Fengrun Zhang

Fengrun Zhang, Wang Geng, Hukai Huang et al.

In this paper, we introduce a speech-conditioned Large Language Model (LLM) integrated with a Mixture of Experts (MoE) based connector to address the challenge of Code-Switching (CS) in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Specifically, we propose an Insertion and Deletion of Interruption Token (IDIT) mechanism for better transfer text generation ability of LLM to speech recognition task. We also present a connecter with MoE architecture that manages multiple languages efficiently. To further enhance the collaboration of multiple experts and leverage the understanding capabilities of LLM, we propose a two-stage progressive training strategy: 1) The connector is unfrozen and trained with language-specialized experts to map speech representations to the text space. 2) The connector and LLM LoRA adaptor are trained with the proposed IDIT mechanism and all experts are activated to learn general representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, including end-to-end and large-scale audio-language models.

Fengrun Zhang, Wangjin Zhou, Yiming Liu et al.

There has been an increasing research interest in cross-age speaker verification~(CASV). However, existing speaker verification systems perform poorly in CASV due to the great individual differences in voice caused by aging. In this paper, we propose a disentangled representation learning framework for CASV based on mutual information~(MI) minimization. In our method, a backbone model is trained to disentangle the identity- and age-related embeddings from speaker information, and an MI estimator is trained to minimize the correlation between age- and identity-related embeddings via MI minimization, resulting in age-invariant speaker embeddings. Furthermore, by using the age gaps between positive and negative samples, we propose an aging-aware MI minimization loss function that allows the backbone model to focus more on the vocal changes with large age gaps. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other methods on multiple Cross-Age test sets of Vox-CA.