Szu-Yu Chen

Yuqi Li, Kuiye Ding, Chuanguang Yang et al.

Time Series foundation models (TSFMs) deliver strong forecasting performance through large-scale pretraining, but their large parameter sizes make deployment costly. While knowledge distillation offers a natural and effective approach for model compression, techniques developed for general machine learning tasks are not directly applicable to time series forecasting due to the unique characteristics. To address this, we present DistilTS, the first distillation framework specifically designed for TSFMs. DistilTS addresses two key challenges: (1) task difficulty discrepancy, specific to forecasting, where uniform weighting makes optimization dominated by easier short-term horizons, while long-term horizons receive weaker supervision; and (2) architecture discrepancy, a general challenge in distillation, for which we design an alignment mechanism in the time series forecasting. To overcome these issues, DistilTS introduces horizon-weighted objectives to balance learning across horizons, and a temporal alignment strategy that reduces architectural mismatch, enabling compact models. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DistilTS achieves forecasting performance comparable to full-sized TSFMs, while reducing parameters by up to 1/150 and accelerating inference by up to 6000x. Code is available at: https://github.com/itsnotacie/DistilTS-ICASSP2026.

Tien-Hong Lo, Szu-Yu Chen, Yao-Ting Sung et al.

A recent line of research on automated speaking assessment (ASA) has benefited from self-supervised learning (SSL) representations, which capture rich acoustic and linguistic patterns in non-native speech without underlying assumptions of feature curation. However, speech-based SSL models capture acoustic-related traits but overlook linguistic content, while text-based SSL models rely on ASR output and fail to encode prosodic nuances. Moreover, most prior arts treat proficiency levels as nominal classes, ignoring their ordinal structure and non-uniform intervals between proficiency labels. To address these limitations, we propose an effective ASA approach combining SSL with handcrafted indicator features via a novel modeling paradigm. We further introduce a multi-margin ordinal loss that jointly models both the score ordinality and non-uniform intervals of proficiency labels. Extensive experiments on the TEEMI corpus show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines and generalizes well to unseen prompts.