Sreyan Ghosh

Sreyan Ghosh, Utkarsh Tyagi, Manan Suri et al.

Complex Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of detecting linguistically complex named entities in low-context text. In this paper, we present ACLM Attention-map aware keyword selection for Conditional Language Model fine-tuning), a novel data augmentation approach based on conditional generation to address the data scarcity problem in low-resource complex NER. ACLM alleviates the context-entity mismatch issue, a problem existing NER data augmentation techniques suffer from and often generates incoherent augmentations by placing complex named entities in the wrong context. ACLM builds on BART and is optimized on a novel text reconstruction or denoising task - we use selective masking (aided by attention maps) to retain the named entities and certain keywords in the input sentence that provide contextually relevant additional knowledge or hints about the named entities. Compared with other data augmentation strategies, ACLM can generate more diverse and coherent augmentations preserving the true word sense of complex entities in the sentence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ACLM both qualitatively and quantitatively on monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual complex NER across various low-resource settings. ACLM outperforms all our neural baselines by a significant margin (1%-36%). In addition, we demonstrate the application of ACLM to other domains that suffer from data scarcity (e.g., biomedical). In practice, ACLM generates more effective and factual augmentations for these domains than prior methods. Code: https://github.com/Sreyan88/ACLM

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru et al.

We present RECAP (REtrieval-Augmented Audio CAPtioning), a novel and effective audio captioning system that generates captions conditioned on an input audio and other captions similar to the audio retrieved from a datastore. Additionally, our proposed method can transfer to any domain without the need for any additional fine-tuning. To generate a caption for an audio sample, we leverage an audio-text model CLAP to retrieve captions similar to it from a replaceable datastore, which are then used to construct a prompt. Next, we feed this prompt to a GPT-2 decoder and introduce cross-attention layers between the CLAP encoder and GPT-2 to condition the audio for caption generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Clotho and AudioCaps, show that RECAP achieves competitive performance in in-domain settings and significant improvements in out-of-domain settings. Additionally, due to its capability to exploit a large text-captions-only datastore in a training-free fashion, RECAP shows unique capabilities of captioning novel audio events never seen during training and compositional audios with multiple events. To promote research in this space, we also release 150,000+ new weakly labeled captions for AudioSet, AudioCaps, and Clotho.

S Sakshi, Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Neil Zhang et al.

Spatial perception is central to auditory intelligence, enabling accurate understanding of real-world acoustic scenes and advancing human-level perception of the world around us. While recent large audio-language models (LALMs) show strong reasoning over complex audios, most operate on monaural inputs and lack the ability to capture spatial cues such as direction, elevation, and distance. We introduce SPUR, a lightweight, plug-in approach that equips LALMs with spatial perception through minimal architectural changes. SPUR consists of: (i) a First-Order Ambisonics (FOA) encoder that maps (W, X, Y, Z) channels to rotation-aware, listener-centric spatial features, integrated into target LALMs via a multimodal adapter; and (ii) SPUR-Set, a spatial QA dataset combining open-source FOA recordings with controlled simulations, emphasizing relative direction, elevation, distance, and overlap for supervised spatial reasoning. Fine-tuning our model on the SPUR-Set consistently improves spatial QA and multi-speaker attribution while preserving general audio understanding. SPUR provides a simple recipe that transforms monaural LALMs into spatially aware models. Extensive ablations validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Aryan Vijay Bhosale, Vishnu Raj et al.

Video-to-music (V2M) is the fundamental task of creating background music for an input video. Recent V2M models achieve audiovisual alignment by typically relying on visual conditioning alone and provide limited semantic and stylistic controllability to the end user. In this paper, we present Video-Robin, a novel text-conditioned video-to-music generation model that enables fast, high-quality, semantically aligned music generation for video content. To balance musical fidelity and semantic understanding, Video-Robin integrates autoregressive planning with diffusion-based synthesis. Specifically, an autoregressive module models global structure by semantically aligning visual and textual inputs to produce high-level music latents. These latents are subsequently refined into coherent, high-fidelity music using local Diffusion Transformers. By factoring semantically driven planning into diffusion-based synthesis, Video-Robin enables fine-grained creator control without sacrificing audio realism. Our proposed model outperforms baselines that solely accept video input and additional feature conditioned baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks with a 2.21x speed in inference compared to SOTA. We will open-source everything upon paper acceptance.

Sanjoy Chowdhury, Sreyan Ghosh, Subhrajyoti Dasgupta et al.

We present AdVerb, a novel audio-visual dereverberation framework that uses visual cues in addition to the reverberant sound to estimate clean audio. Although audio-only dereverberation is a well-studied problem, our approach incorporates the complementary visual modality to perform audio dereverberation. Given an image of the environment where the reverberated sound signal has been recorded, AdVerb employs a novel geometry-aware cross-modal transformer architecture that captures scene geometry and audio-visual cross-modal relationship to generate a complex ideal ratio mask, which, when applied to the reverberant audio predicts the clean sound. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our approach significantly outperforms traditional audio-only and audio-visual baselines on three downstream tasks: speech enhancement, speech recognition, and speaker verification, with relative improvements in the range of 18% - 82% on the LibriSpeech test-clean set. We also achieve highly satisfactory RT60 error scores on the AVSpeech dataset.

Sreyan Ghosh, Ashish Seth, and Deepak Mittal et al.

Inspired by the recent progress in self-supervised learning for computer vision, in this paper we introduce DeLoRes, a new general-purpose audio representation learning approach. Our main objective is to make our network learn representations in a resource-constrained setting (both data and compute), that can generalize well across a diverse set of downstream tasks. Inspired from the Barlow Twins objective function, we propose to learn embeddings that are invariant to distortions of an input audio sample, while making sure that they contain non-redundant information about the sample. To achieve this, we measure the cross-correlation matrix between the outputs of two identical networks fed with distorted versions of an audio segment sampled from an audio file and make it as close to the identity matrix as possible. We use a combination of a small subset of the large-scale AudioSet dataset and FSD50K for self-supervised learning and are able to learn with less than half the parameters compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. For evaluation, we transfer these learned representations to 9 downstream classification tasks, including speech, music, and animal sounds, and show competitive results under different evaluation setups. In addition to being simple and intuitive, our pre-training algorithm is amenable to compute through its inherent nature of construction and does not require careful implementation details to avoid trivial or degenerate solutions. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies on our results and make all our code and pre-trained models publicly available https://github.com/Speech-Lab-IITM/DeLoRes.

Vasista Sai Lodagala, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh

In this paper, we propose a new Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) algorithm called data2vec-aqc, for speech representation learning from unlabeled speech data. Our goal is to improve SSL for speech in domains where both unlabeled and labeled data are limited. Building on the recently introduced data2vec, we introduce additional modules to the data2vec framework that leverage the benefit of data augmentations, quantized representations, and clustering. The interaction between these modules helps solve the cross-contrastive loss as an additional self-supervised objective. data2vec-aqc achieves up to 14.1% and 20.9% relative WER improvement over the existing state-of-the-art data2vec system over the test-clean and test-other sets, respectively of LibriSpeech, without the use of any language model (LM). Our proposed model also achieves up to 17.8\% relative WER gains over the baseline data2vec when fine-tuned on a subset of the Switchboard dataset. Code: https://github.com/Speech-Lab-IITM/data2vec-aqc.

Sreyan Ghosh, Ashish Seth, Sonal Kumar et al.

A fundamental characteristic of audio is its compositional nature. Audio-language models (ALMs) trained using a contrastive approach (e.g., CLAP) that learns a shared representation between audio and language modalities have improved performance in many downstream applications, including zero-shot audio classification, audio retrieval, etc. However, the ability of these models to effectively perform compositional reasoning remains largely unexplored and necessitates additional research. In this paper, we propose CompA, a collection of two expert-annotated benchmarks with a majority of real-world audio samples, to evaluate compositional reasoning in ALMs. Our proposed CompA-order evaluates how well an ALM understands the order or occurrence of acoustic events in audio, and CompA-attribute evaluates attribute-binding of acoustic events. An instance from either benchmark consists of two audio-caption pairs, where both audios have the same acoustic events but with different compositions. An ALM is evaluated on how well it matches the right audio to the right caption. Using this benchmark, we first show that current ALMs perform only marginally better than random chance, thereby struggling with compositional reasoning. Next, we propose CompA-CLAP, where we fine-tune CLAP using a novel learning method to improve its compositional reasoning abilities. To train CompA-CLAP, we first propose improvements to contrastive training with composition-aware hard negatives, allowing for more focused training. Next, we propose a novel modular contrastive loss that helps the model learn fine-grained compositional understanding and overcomes the acute scarcity of openly available compositional audios. CompA-CLAP significantly improves over all our baseline models on the CompA benchmark, indicating its superior compositional reasoning capabilities.

Sreyan Ghosh, Ashish Seth, S. Umesh et al.

We present Multiscale Audio Spectrogram Transformer (MAST) for audio classification, which brings the concept of multiscale feature hierarchies to the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST). Given an input audio spectrogram, we first patchify and project it into an initial temporal resolution and embedding dimension, post which the multiple stages in MAST progressively expand the embedding dimension while reducing the temporal resolution of the input. We use a pyramid structure that allows early layers of MAST operating at a high temporal resolution but low embedding space to model simple low-level acoustic information and deeper temporally coarse layers to model high-level acoustic information with high-dimensional embeddings. We also extend our approach to present a new Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) method called SS-MAST, which calculates a symmetric contrastive loss between latent representations from a student and a teacher encoder, leveraging patch-drop, a novel audio augmentation approach that we introduce. In practice, MAST significantly outperforms AST by an average accuracy of 3.4% across 8 speech and non-speech tasks from the LAPE Benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art results on keyword spotting in Speech Commands. Additionally, our proposed SS-MAST achieves an absolute average improvement of 2.6% over the previously proposed SSAST.

Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh et al.

We present a new Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) approach to pre-train encoders on unlabeled audio data that reduces the need for large amounts of labeled data for audio and speech classification. Our primary aim is to learn audio representations that can generalize across a large variety of speech and non-speech tasks in a low-resource un-labeled audio pre-training setting. Inspired by the recent success of clustering and contrasting learning paradigms for SSL-based speech representation learning, we propose SLICER (Symmetrical Learning of Instance and Cluster-level Efficient Representations), which brings together the best of both clustering and contrasting learning paradigms. We use a symmetric loss between latent representations from student and teacher encoders and simultaneously solve instance and cluster-level contrastive learning tasks. We obtain cluster representations online by just projecting the input spectrogram into an output subspace with dimensions equal to the number of clusters. In addition, we propose a novel mel-spectrogram augmentation procedure, k-mix, based on mixup, which does not require labels and aids unsupervised representation learning for audio. Overall, SLICER achieves state-of-the-art results on the LAPE Benchmark \cite{9868132}, significantly outperforming DeLoRes-M and other prior approaches, which are pre-trained on $10\times$ larger of unsupervised data. We will make all our codes available on GitHub.

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru et al.

Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.

Anton Ratnarajah, Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar et al.

Accurate estimation of Room Impulse Response (RIR), which captures an environment's acoustic properties, is important for speech processing and AR/VR applications. We propose AV-RIR, a novel multi-modal multi-task learning approach to accurately estimate the RIR from a given reverberant speech signal and the visual cues of its corresponding environment. AV-RIR builds on a novel neural codec-based architecture that effectively captures environment geometry and materials properties and solves speech dereverberation as an auxiliary task by using multi-task learning. We also propose Geo-Mat features that augment material information into visual cues and CRIP that improves late reverberation components in the estimated RIR via image-to-RIR retrieval by 86%. Empirical results show that AV-RIR quantitatively outperforms previous audio-only and visual-only approaches by achieving 36% - 63% improvement across various acoustic metrics in RIR estimation. Additionally, it also achieves higher preference scores in human evaluation. As an auxiliary benefit, dereverbed speech from AV-RIR shows competitive performance with the state-of-the-art in various spoken language processing tasks and outperforms reverberation time error score in the real-world AVSpeech dataset. Qualitative examples of both synthesized reverberant speech and enhanced speech can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTsKhviukAE.

Sreyan Ghosh, Chandra Kiran Evuru, Sonal Kumar et al.

We present DALE, a novel and effective generative Data Augmentation framework for low-resource LEgal NLP. DALE addresses the challenges existing frameworks pose in generating effective data augmentations of legal documents - legal language, with its specialized vocabulary and complex semantics, morphology, and syntax, does not benefit from data augmentations that merely rephrase the source sentence. To address this, DALE, built on an Encoder-Decoder Language Model, is pre-trained on a novel unsupervised text denoising objective based on selective masking - our masking strategy exploits the domain-specific language characteristics of templatized legal documents to mask collocated spans of text. Denoising these spans helps DALE acquire knowledge about legal concepts, principles, and language usage. Consequently, it develops the ability to generate coherent and diverse augmentations with novel contexts. Finally, DALE performs conditional generation to generate synthetic augmentations for low-resource Legal NLP tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DALE on 13 datasets spanning 6 tasks and 4 low-resource settings. DALE outperforms all our baselines, including LLMs, qualitatively and quantitatively, with improvements of 1%-50%.

Sreyan Ghosh, Manan Suri, Purva Chiniya et al.

The tremendous growth of social media users interacting in online conversations has led to significant growth in hate speech, affecting people from various demographics. Most of the prior works focus on detecting explicit hate speech, which is overt and leverages hateful phrases, with very little work focusing on detecting hate speech that is implicit or denotes hatred through indirect or coded language. In this paper, we present CoSyn, a context-synergized neural network that explicitly incorporates user- and conversational context for detecting implicit hate speech in online conversations. CoSyn introduces novel ways to encode these external contexts and employs a novel context interaction mechanism that clearly captures the interplay between them, making independent assessments of the amounts of information to be retrieved from these noisy contexts. Additionally, it carries out all these operations in the hyperbolic space to account for the scale-free dynamics of social media. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoSyn on 6 hate speech datasets and show that CoSyn outperforms all our baselines in detecting implicit hate speech with absolute improvements in the range of 1.24% - 57.8%.

Vasista Sai Lodagala, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh

While Self-Supervised Learning has helped reap the benefit of the scale from the available unlabeled data, the learning paradigms are continuously being bettered. We present a new pre-training strategy named ccc-wav2vec 2.0, which uses clustering and an augmentation-based cross-contrastive loss as its self-supervised objective. Through the clustering module, we scale down the influence of those negative examples that are highly similar to the positive. The Cross-Contrastive loss is computed between the encoder output of the original sample and the quantizer output of its augmentation and vice-versa, bringing robustness to the pre-training strategy. ccc-wav2vec 2.0 achieves up to 15.6% and 12.7% relative WER improvement over the baseline wav2vec 2.0 on the test-clean and test-other sets, respectively, of LibriSpeech, without the use of any language model. The proposed method also achieves up to 14.9% relative WER improvement over the baseline wav2vec 2.0 when fine-tuned on Switchboard data. We make all our codes publicly available on GitHub.

Sreyan Ghosh, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar et al.

Disfluency, though originating from human spoken utterances, is primarily studied as a uni-modal text-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) task. Based on early-fusion and self-attention-based multimodal interaction between text and acoustic modalities, in this paper, we propose a novel multimodal architecture for disfluency detection from individual utterances. Our architecture leverages a multimodal dynamic fusion network that adds minimal parameters over an existing text encoder commonly used in prior art to leverage the prosodic and acoustic cues hidden in speech. Through experiments, we show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used English Switchboard for disfluency detection and outperforms prior unimodal and multimodal systems in literature by a significant margin. In addition, we make a thorough qualitative analysis and show that, unlike text-only systems, which suffer from spurious correlations in the data, our system overcomes this problem through additional cues from speech signals. We make all our codes publicly available on GitHub.

Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Lasha Koroshinadze et al.

We introduce Music Flamingo, a novel large audio-language model designed to advance music (including song) understanding in foundational audio models. While audio-language research has progressed rapidly, music remains challenging due to its dynamic, layered, and information-dense nature. Progress has been further limited by the difficulty of scaling open audio understanding models, primarily because of the scarcity of high-quality music data and annotations. As a result, prior models are restricted to producing short, high-level captions, answering only surface-level questions, and showing limited generalization across diverse musical cultures. To address these challenges, we curate MF-Skills, a large-scale dataset labeled through a multi-stage pipeline that yields rich captions and question-answer pairs covering harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context. We fine-tune an enhanced Audio Flamingo 3 backbone on MF-Skills and further strengthen multiple skills relevant to music understanding. To improve the model's reasoning abilities, we introduce a post-training recipe: we first cold-start with MF-Think, a novel chain-of-thought dataset grounded in music theory, followed by GRPO-based reinforcement learning with custom rewards. Music Flamingo achieves state-of-the-art results across 10+ benchmarks for music understanding and reasoning, establishing itself as a generalist and musically intelligent audio-language model. Beyond strong empirical results, Music Flamingo sets a new standard for advanced music understanding by demonstrating how models can move from surface-level recognition toward layered, human-like perception of songs. We believe this work provides both a benchmark and a foundation for the community to build the next generation of models that engage with music as meaningfully as humans do.

S Sakshi, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar et al.

The ability to comprehend audio--which includes speech, non-speech sounds, and music--is crucial for AI agents to interact effectively with the world. We present MMAU, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal audio understanding models on tasks requiring expert-level knowledge and complex reasoning. MMAU comprises 10k carefully curated audio clips paired with human-annotated natural language questions and answers spanning speech, environmental sounds, and music. It includes information extraction and reasoning questions, requiring models to demonstrate 27 distinct skills across unique and challenging tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU emphasizes advanced perception and reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, challenging models to tackle tasks akin to those faced by experts. We assess 18 open-source and proprietary (Large) Audio-Language Models, demonstrating the significant challenges posed by MMAU. Notably, even the most advanced Gemini Pro v1.5 achieves only 52.97% accuracy, and the state-of-the-art open-source Qwen2-Audio achieves only 52.50%, highlighting considerable room for improvement. We believe MMAU will drive the audio and multimodal research community to develop more advanced audio understanding models capable of solving complex audio tasks.

Sreyan Ghosh, Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, Sonal Kumar et al.

Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world atypical scenarios where such features are absent. This paper presents ASPIRE (Language-guided Data Augmentation for SPurIous correlation REmoval), a simple yet effective solution for supplementing the training dataset with images without spurious features, for robust learning against spurious correlations via better generalization. ASPIRE, guided by language at various steps, can generate non-spurious images without requiring any group labeling or existing non-spurious images in the training set. Precisely, we employ LLMs to first extract foreground and background features from textual descriptions of an image, followed by advanced language-guided image editing to discover the features that are spuriously correlated with the class label. Finally, we personalize a text-to-image generation model using the edited images to generate diverse in-domain images without spurious features. ASPIRE is complementary to all prior robust training methods in literature, and we demonstrate its effectiveness across 4 datasets and 9 baselines and show that ASPIRE improves the worst-group classification accuracy of prior methods by 1% - 38%. We also contribute a novel test set for the challenging Hard ImageNet dataset.

Sreyan Ghosh, Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, Sonal Kumar et al.

Instruction Tuning (IT), the process of training large language models (LLMs) using instruction-response pairs, has emerged as the predominant method for transforming base pre-trained LLMs into open-domain conversational agents. While IT has achieved notable success and widespread adoption, its limitations and shortcomings remain underexplored. In this paper, through rigorous experiments and an in-depth analysis of the changes LLMs undergo through IT, we reveal various limitations of IT. In particular, we show that (1) IT fails to enhance knowledge or skills in LLMs. LoRA fine-tuning is limited to learning response initiation and style tokens, and full-parameter fine-tuning leads to knowledge degradation. (2) Copying response patterns from IT datasets derived from knowledgeable sources leads to a decline in response quality. (3) Full-parameter fine-tuning increases hallucination by inaccurately borrowing tokens from conceptually similar instances in the IT dataset for generating responses. (4) Popular methods to improve IT do not lead to performance improvements over a simple LoRA fine-tuned model. Our findings reveal that responses generated solely from pre-trained knowledge consistently outperform responses by models that learn any form of new knowledge from IT on open-source datasets. We hope the insights and challenges revealed in this paper inspire future work in related directions.

Sreyan Ghosh, Zhifeng Kong, Sonal Kumar et al.

Understanding and reasoning over non-speech sounds and music are crucial for both humans and AI agents to interact effectively with their environments. In this paper, we introduce Audio Flamingo 2 (AF2), an Audio-Language Model (ALM) with advanced audio understanding and reasoning capabilities. AF2 leverages (i) a custom CLAP model, (ii) synthetic Audio QA data for fine-grained audio reasoning, and (iii) a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy. AF2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with only a 3B parameter small language model, surpassing large open-source and proprietary models across over 20 benchmarks. Next, for the first time, we extend audio understanding to long audio segments (30 secs to 5 mins) and propose LongAudio, a large and novel dataset for training ALMs on long audio captioning and question-answering tasks. Fine-tuning AF2 on LongAudio leads to exceptional performance on our proposed LongAudioBench, an expert annotated benchmark for evaluating ALMs on long audio understanding capabilities. We conduct extensive ablation studies to confirm the efficacy of our approach. Project Website: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/AF2/.

Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh et al.

In this paper, we introduce UnFuSeD, a novel approach to leverage self-supervised learning and reduce the need for large amounts of labeled data for audio classification. Unlike prior works, which directly fine-tune a self-supervised pre-trained encoder on a target dataset, we use the encoder to generate pseudo-labels for unsupervised fine-tuning before the actual fine-tuning step. We first train an encoder using a novel self-supervised learning algorithm (SSL) on an unlabeled audio dataset. Then, we use that encoder to generate pseudo-labels on our target task dataset via clustering the extracted representations. These pseudo-labels are then used to guide self-distillation on a randomly initialized model, which we call unsupervised fine-tuning. Finally, the resultant encoder is then fine-tuned on our target task dataset. Through UnFuSeD, we propose the first system that moves away from generic SSL paradigms in literature, which pre-train and fine-tune the same encoder, and present a novel self-distillation-based system to leverage SSL pre-training for low-resource audio classification. In practice, UnFuSeD achieves state-of-the-art results on the LAPE Benchmark, significantly outperforming all our baselines. Additionally, UnFuSeD allows us to achieve this at a 40% reduction in the number of parameters over the previous state-of-the-art system. We make all our codes publicly available.

Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar et al.

We present CoDa (Constrained Generation based Data Augmentation), a controllable, effective, and training-free data augmentation technique for low-resource (data-scarce) NLP. Our approach is based on prompting off-the-shelf instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating text that satisfies a set of constraints. Precisely, we extract a set of simple constraints from every instance in the low-resource dataset and verbalize them to prompt an LLM to generate novel and diverse training instances. Our findings reveal that synthetic data that follows simple constraints in the downstream dataset act as highly effective augmentations, and CoDa can achieve this without intricate decoding-time constrained generation techniques or fine-tuning with complex algorithms that eventually make the model biased toward the small number of training instances. Additionally, CoDa is the first framework that provides users explicit control over the augmentation generation process, thereby also allowing easy adaptation to several domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoDa across 11 datasets spanning 3 tasks and 3 low-resource settings. CoDa outperforms all our baselines, qualitatively and quantitatively, with improvements of 0.12%-7.19%. Code is available here: https://github.com/Sreyan88/CoDa

Sonal Kumar, Sreyan Ghosh, S Sakshi et al.

Open-vocabulary vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, trained using contrastive loss, have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text-to-image retrieval. However, do VLMs understand compound nouns (CNs) (e.g., lab coat) as well as they understand nouns (e.g., lab)? We curate Compun, a novel benchmark with 400 unique and commonly used CNs, to evaluate the effectiveness of VLMs in interpreting CNs. The Compun benchmark challenges a VLM for text-to-image retrieval where, given a text prompt with a CN, the task is to select the correct image that shows the CN among a pair of distractor images that show the constituent nouns that make up the CN. Next, we perform an in-depth analysis to highlight CLIPs' limited understanding of certain types of CNs. Finally, we present an alternative framework that moves beyond hand-written templates for text prompts widely used by CLIP-like models. We employ a Large Language Model to generate multiple diverse captions that include the CN as an object in the scene described by the caption. Our proposed method improves CN understanding of CLIP by 8.25% on Compun. Code and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/sonalkum/Compun

Ashish Seth, Utkarsh Tyagi, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex multimodal tasks. While MLLMs excel at visual perception and reasoning in third-person and egocentric videos, they are prone to hallucinations, generating coherent yet inaccurate responses. We present EgoIllusion, a first benchmark to evaluate MLLM hallucinations in egocentric videos. EgoIllusion comprises 1,400 videos paired with 8,000 human-annotated open and closed-ended questions designed to trigger hallucinations in both visual and auditory cues in egocentric videos. Evaluations across ten MLLMs reveal significant challenges, including powerful models like GPT-4o and Gemini, achieving only 59% accuracy. EgoIllusion lays the foundation in developing robust benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of MLLMs and spurs the development of better egocentric MLLMs with reduced hallucination rates. Our benchmark will be open-sourced for reproducibility.

Sreyan Ghosh, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar et al.

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BioNER) is the fundamental task of identifying named entities from biomedical text. However, BioNER suffers from severe data scarcity and lacks high-quality labeled data due to the highly specialized and expert knowledge required for annotation. Though data augmentation has shown to be highly effective for low-resource NER in general, existing data augmentation techniques fail to produce factual and diverse augmentations for BioNER. In this paper, we present BioAug, a novel data augmentation framework for low-resource BioNER. BioAug, built on BART, is trained to solve a novel text reconstruction task based on selective masking and knowledge augmentation. Post training, we perform conditional generation and generate diverse augmentations conditioning BioAug on selectively corrupted text similar to the training stage. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BioAug on 5 benchmark BioNER datasets and show that BioAug outperforms all our baselines by a significant margin (1.5%-21.5% absolute improvement) and is able to generate augmentations that are both more factual and diverse. Code: https://github.com/Sreyan88/BioAug.

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Yaman Kumar Singla et al.

Existing approaches in disfluency detection focus on solving a token-level classification task for identifying and removing disfluencies in text. Moreover, most works focus on leveraging only contextual information captured by the linear sequences in text, thus ignoring the structured information in text which is efficiently captured by dependency trees. In this paper, building on the span classification paradigm of entity recognition, we propose a novel architecture for detecting disfluencies in transcripts from spoken utterances, incorporating both contextual information through transformers and long-distance structured information captured by dependency trees, through graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used English Switchboard for disfluency detection and outperforms prior-art by a significant margin. We make all our codes publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/Sreyan88/Disfluency-Detection-with-Span-Classification)

Sreyan Ghosh, Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, Sonal Kumar et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often produce responses that misalign with factual information, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. While hallucinations are well-studied, the exact causes behind them remain underexplored. In this paper, we first investigate the root causes of hallucinations in LVLMs. Our findings reveal that existing mitigation techniques primarily reduce hallucinations for visual recognition prompts-those that require simple descriptions of visual elements-but fail for cognitive prompts that demand deliberate reasoning. We identify the core issue as a lack of true visual perception in LVLMs: although they can accurately recognize visual elements, they struggle to fully interpret these elements in the context of the input prompt and effectively link this recognition to their internal knowledge, which is critical for reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method designed to enhance visual perception and improve reasoning capabilities in LVLMs. VDGD works by first generating a detailed description of the image and appending it as a prefix to the instruction. During response generation, tokens are sampled based on their KL divergence to the description, favoring candidates with lower divergence. Experimental results on multiple visual reasoning benchmarks and LVLMs demonstrate that VDGD consistently outperforms existing baselines 2% - 33%. Finally, we introduce VaLLu, a benchmark designed for comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

Sreyan Ghosh, Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli, Michael Levit et al.

Generative Error Correction (GEC) has emerged as a powerful post-processing method to enhance the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, we show that GEC models struggle to generalize beyond the specific types of errors encountered during training, limiting their ability to correct new, unseen errors at test time, particularly in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios. This phenomenon amplifies with named entities (NEs), where, in addition to insufficient contextual information or knowledge about the NEs, novel NEs keep emerging. To address these issues, we propose DARAG (Data- and Retrieval-Augmented Generative Error Correction), a novel approach designed to improve GEC for ASR in in-domain (ID) and OOD scenarios. We augment the GEC training dataset with synthetic data generated by prompting LLMs and text-to-speech models, thereby simulating additional errors from which the model can learn. For OOD scenarios, we simulate test-time errors from new domains similarly and in an unsupervised fashion. Additionally, to better handle named entities, we introduce retrieval-augmented correction by augmenting the input with entities retrieved from a database. Our approach is simple, scalable, and both domain- and language-agnostic. We experiment on multiple datasets and settings, showing that DARAG outperforms all our baselines, achieving 8\% -- 30\% relative WER improvements in ID and 10\% -- 33\% improvements in OOD settings.

Chao-Han Huck Yang, Sreyan Ghosh, Qing Wang et al.

We present Task 5 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge: an Audio Question Answering (AQA) benchmark spanning multiple domains of sound understanding. This task defines three QA subsets (Bioacoustics, Temporal Soundscapes, and Complex QA) to test audio-language models on interactive question-answering over diverse acoustic scenes. We describe the dataset composition (from marine mammal calls to soundscapes and complex real-world clips), the evaluation protocol (top-1 accuracy with answer-shuffling robustness), and baseline systems (Qwen2-Audio-7B, AudioFlamingo 2, Gemini-2-Flash). Preliminary results on the development set are compared, showing strong variation across models and subsets. This challenge aims to advance the audio understanding and reasoning capabilities of audio-language models toward human-level acuity, which are crucial for enabling AI agents to perceive and interact about the world effectively.

Ashish Seth, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, S Sakshi et al.

In this paper, we present EH-MAM (Easy-to-Hard adaptive Masked Acoustic Modeling), a novel self-supervised learning approach for speech representation learning. In contrast to the prior methods that use random masking schemes for Masked Acoustic Modeling (MAM), we introduce a novel selective and adaptive masking strategy. Specifically, during SSL training, we progressively introduce harder regions to the model for reconstruction. Our approach automatically selects hard regions and is built on the observation that the reconstruction loss of individual frames in MAM can provide natural signals to judge the difficulty of solving the MAM pre-text task for that frame. To identify these hard regions, we employ a teacher model that first predicts the frame-wise losses and then decides which frames to mask. By learning to create challenging problems, such as identifying harder frames and solving them simultaneously, the model is able to learn more effective representations and thereby acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the speech. Quantitatively, EH-MAM outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines across various low-resource speech recognition and SUPERB benchmarks by 5%-10%. Additionally, we conduct a thorough analysis to show that the regions masked by EH-MAM effectively capture useful context across speech frames.

Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh et al.

Continued self-supervised (SSL) pre-training for adapting existing SSL models to the target domain has shown to be extremely effective for low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). This paper proposes Stable Distillation, a simple and novel approach for SSL-based continued pre-training that boosts ASR performance in the target domain where both labeled and unlabeled data are limited. Stable Distillation employs self-distillation as regularization for continued pre-training, alleviating the over-fitting issue, a common problem continued pre-training faces when the source and target domains differ. Specifically, first, we perform vanilla continued pre-training on an initial SSL pre-trained model on the target domain ASR dataset and call it the teacher. Next, we take the same initial pre-trained model as a student to perform continued pre-training while enforcing its hidden representations to be close to that of the teacher (via MSE loss). This student is then used for downstream ASR fine-tuning on the target dataset. In practice, Stable Distillation outperforms all our baselines by 0.8 - 7 WER when evaluated in various experimental settings.

Zhifeng Kong, Arushi Goel, Joao Felipe Santos et al.

Chain-of-thought reasoning has demonstrated significant improvements in large language models and vision language models, yet its potential for audio language models remains largely unexplored. In this technical report, we take a preliminary step towards closing this gap. For better assessment of sound reasoning, we propose AF-Reasoning-Eval, a benchmark targeting common-sense reasoning and the ability to discriminate among closely related choices. To prepare training corpus for sound reasoning abilities, we propose automatic pipelines that transform existing audio question answering and classification data into explicit reasoning chains, yielding AF-CoT-Train with 1.24M samples. We study the effect of finetuning Audio Flamingo series on AF-CoT-Train and observe considerable improvements on several reasoning benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of chain-of-thought finetuning on advanced sound understanding.

Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Sonal Kumar, Hemant Kumar Giri et al.

Open-vocabulary audio language models (ALMs), like Contrastive Language Audio Pretraining (CLAP), represent a promising new paradigm for audio-text retrieval using natural language queries. In this paper, for the first time, we perform controlled experiments on various benchmarks to show that existing ALMs struggle to generalize to linguistic variations in textual queries. To address this issue, we propose RobustCLAP, a novel and compute-efficient technique to learn audio-language representations agnostic to linguistic variations. Specifically, we reformulate the contrastive loss used in CLAP architectures by introducing a multi-view contrastive learning objective, where paraphrases are treated as different views of the same audio scene and use this for training. Our proposed approach improves the text-to-audio retrieval performance of CLAP by 0.8%-13% across benchmarks and enhances robustness to linguistic variation.

Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh et al.

Continued pre-training (CP) offers multiple advantages, like target domain adaptation and the potential to exploit the continuous stream of unlabeled data available online. However, continued pre-training on out-of-domain distributions often leads to catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge, leading to sub-optimal ASR performance. This paper presents FusDom, a simple and novel methodology for SSL-based continued pre-training. FusDom learns speech representations that are robust and adaptive yet not forgetful of concepts seen in the past. Instead of solving the SSL pre-text task on the output representations of a single model, FusDom leverages two identical pre-trained SSL models, a teacher and a student, with a modified pre-training head to solve the CP SSL pre-text task. This head employs a cross-attention mechanism between the representations of both models while only the student receives gradient updates and the teacher does not. Finally, the student is fine-tuned for ASR. In practice, FusDom outperforms all our baselines across settings significantly, with WER improvements in the range of 0.2 WER - 7.3 WER in the target domain while retaining the performance in the earlier domain.

Jinchuan Tian, Sang-gil Lee, Zhifeng Kong et al. · nvidia

Recent advances in the audio language modeling (ALM) domain tackle audio understanding and text-to-audio generation as separate tasks. Very few studies attempt to unify these tasks -- an essential step toward advanced multimodal reasoning. This paper introduces U}nified Audio Language Model (UALM), which aims to unify audio understanding, text-to-audio generation, and multimodal reasoning in a single model. To achieve this goal, we first present UALM-Gen, a text-to-audio language model that directly predicts audio tokens and is comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based models. We then demonstrate, using proper data blending, training recipes, and inference techniques, that our single UALM model matches the quality of state-of-the-art specialized models in audio understanding, text-to-audio generation, and text reasoning. Furthermore, we present UALM-Reason, a multimodal reasoning model that utilizes both text and audio in the intermediate thinking steps to facilitate complex generation tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration in audio research of cross-modal generative reasoning, with its effectiveness confirmed by subjective evaluations.

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Ashish Seth et al.

Perceiving and understanding non-speech sounds and non-verbal speech is essential to making decisions that help us interact with our surroundings. In this paper, we propose GAMA, a novel General-purpose Large Audio-Language Model (LALM) with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities. We build GAMA by integrating an LLM with multiple types of audio representations, including features from a custom Audio Q-Former, a multi-layer aggregator that aggregates features from multiple layers of an audio encoder. We fine-tune GAMA on a large-scale audio-language dataset, which augments it with audio understanding capabilities. Next, we propose CompA-R (Instruction-Tuning for Complex Audio Reasoning), a synthetically generated instruction-tuning (IT) dataset with instructions that require the model to perform complex reasoning on the input audio. We instruction-tune GAMA with CompA-R to endow it with complex reasoning abilities, where we further add a soft prompt as input with high-level semantic evidence by leveraging event tags of the input audio. Finally, we also propose CompA-R-test, a human-labeled evaluation dataset for evaluating the capabilities of LALMs on open-ended audio question-answering that requires complex reasoning. Through automated and expert human evaluations, we show that GAMA outperforms all other LALMs in literature on diverse audio understanding tasks by margins of 1%-84%. Further, GAMA IT-ed on CompA-R proves to be superior in its complex reasoning and instruction following capabilities.

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Ashish Seth et al.

Visual cues, like lip motion, have been shown to improve the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in noisy environments. We propose LipGER (Lip Motion aided Generative Error Correction), a novel framework for leveraging visual cues for noise-robust ASR. Instead of learning the cross-modal correlation between the audio and visual modalities, we make an LLM learn the task of visually-conditioned (generative) ASR error correction. Specifically, we instruct an LLM to predict the transcription from the N-best hypotheses generated using ASR beam-search. This is further conditioned on lip motions. This approach addresses key challenges in traditional AVSR learning, such as the lack of large-scale paired datasets and difficulties in adapting to new domains. We experiment on 4 datasets in various settings and show that LipGER improves the Word Error Rate in the range of 1.1%-49.2%. We also release LipHyp, a large-scale dataset with hypothesis-transcription pairs that is additionally equipped with lip motion cues to promote further research in this space

Sreyan Ghosh, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar et al.

We present ABEX, a novel and effective generative data augmentation methodology for low-resource Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. ABEX is based on ABstract-and-EXpand, a novel paradigm for generating diverse forms of an input document -- we first convert a document into its concise, abstract description and then generate new documents based on expanding the resultant abstraction. To learn the task of expanding abstract descriptions, we first train BART on a large-scale synthetic dataset with abstract-document pairs. Next, to generate abstract descriptions for a document, we propose a simple, controllable, and training-free method based on editing AMR graphs. ABEX brings the best of both worlds: by expanding from abstract representations, it preserves the original semantic properties of the documents, like style and meaning, thereby maintaining alignment with the original label and data distribution. At the same time, the fundamental process of elaborating on abstract descriptions facilitates diverse generations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ABEX on 4 NLU tasks spanning 12 datasets and 4 low-resource settings. ABEX outperforms all our baselines qualitatively with improvements of 0.04% - 38.8%. Qualitatively, ABEX outperforms all prior methods from literature in terms of context and length diversity.

Ashish Seth, Lodagala V S V Durga Prasad, Sreyan Ghosh et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn high-level speech representations has been a popular approach to building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in low-resource settings. However, the common assumption made in literature is that a considerable amount of unlabeled data is available for the same domain or language that can be leveraged for SSL pre-training, which we acknowledge is not feasible in a real-world setting. In this paper, as part of the Interspeech Gram Vaani ASR challenge, we try to study the effect of domain, language, dataset size, and other aspects of our upstream pre-training SSL data on the final performance low-resource downstream ASR task. We also build on the continued pre-training paradigm to study the effect of prior knowledge possessed by models trained using SSL. Extensive experiments and studies reveal that the performance of ASR systems is susceptible to the data used for SSL pre-training. Their performance improves with an increase in similarity and volume of pre-training data. We believe our work will be helpful to the speech community in building better ASR systems in low-resource settings and steer research towards improving generalization in SSL-based pre-training for speech systems.

Lodagala V S V Durga Prasad, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh

While self-supervised speech representation learning (SSL) models serve a variety of downstream tasks, these models have been observed to overfit to the domain from which the unlabelled data originates. To alleviate this issue, we propose PADA (Pruning Assisted Domain Adaptation) and zero out redundant weights from models pre-trained on large amounts of out-of-domain (OOD) data. Intuitively, this helps to make space for the target-domain ASR finetuning. The redundant weights can be identified through various pruning strategies which have been discussed in detail as a part of this work. Specifically, we investigate the effect of the recently discovered Task-Agnostic and Task-Aware pruning on PADA and propose a new pruning paradigm based on the latter, which we call Cross-Domain Task-Aware Pruning (CD-TAW). CD-TAW obtains the initial pruning mask from a well fine-tuned OOD model, which makes it starkly different from the rest of the pruning strategies discussed in the paper. Our proposed CD-TAW methodology achieves up to 20.6% relative WER improvement over our baseline when fine-tuned on a 2-hour subset of Switchboard data without language model (LM) decoding. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis to highlight the key design choices of our proposed method.

Sreyan Ghosh, S Ramaneswaran, Utkarsh Tyagi et al.

Expression of emotions is a crucial part of daily human communication. Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is an emerging field of study, where the primary task is to identify the emotion behind each utterance in a conversation. Though a lot of work has been done on ERC in the past, these works only focus on ERC in the English language, thereby ignoring any other languages. In this paper, we present Multilingual MELD (M-MELD), where we extend the Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD) \cite{poria2018meld} to 4 other languages beyond English, namely Greek, Polish, French, and Spanish. Beyond just establishing strong baselines for all of these 4 languages, we also propose a novel architecture, DiscLSTM, that uses both sequential and conversational discourse context in a conversational dialogue for ERC. Our proposed approach is computationally efficient, can transfer across languages using just a cross-lingual encoder, and achieves better performance than most uni-modal text approaches in the literature on both MELD and M-MELD. We make our data and code publicly on GitHub.

Sreyan Ghosh, Utkarsh Tyagi, S Ramaneswaran et al.

In this paper, we propose MMER, a novel Multimodal Multi-task learning approach for Speech Emotion Recognition. MMER leverages a novel multimodal network based on early-fusion and cross-modal self-attention between text and acoustic modalities and solves three novel auxiliary tasks for learning emotion recognition from spoken utterances. In practice, MMER outperforms all our baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the IEMOCAP benchmark. Additionally, we conduct extensive ablation studies and results analysis to prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Zaki Mustafa Farooqi, Sreyan Ghosh, Rajiv Ratn Shah

In the current era of the internet, where social media platforms are easily accessible for everyone, people often have to deal with threats, identity attacks, hate, and bullying due to their association with a cast, creed, gender, religion, or even acceptance or rejection of a notion. Existing works in hate speech detection primarily focus on individual comment classification as a sequence labeling task and often fail to consider the context of the conversation. The context of a conversation often plays a substantial role when determining the author's intent and sentiment behind the tweet. This paper describes the system proposed by team MIDAS-IIITD for HASOC 2021 subtask 2, one of the first shared tasks focusing on detecting hate speech from Hindi-English code-mixed conversations on Twitter. We approach this problem using neural networks, leveraging the transformer's cross-lingual embeddings and further finetuning them for low-resource hate-speech classification in transliterated Hindi text. Our best performing system, a hard voting ensemble of Indic-BERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and Multilingual BERT, achieved a macro F1 score of 0.7253, placing us first on the overall leaderboard standings.

Sreyan Ghosh, Sandesh V Katta, Ashish Seth et al.

We introduce DECAR, a self-supervised pre-training approach for learning general-purpose audio representations. Our system is based on clustering: it utilizes an offline clustering step to provide target labels that act as pseudo-labels for solving a prediction task. We develop on top of recent advances in self-supervised learning for computer vision and design a lightweight, easy-to-use self-supervised pre-training scheme. We pre-train DECAR embeddings on a balanced subset of the large-scale Audioset dataset and transfer those representations to 9 downstream classification tasks, including speech, music, animal sounds, and acoustic scenes. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies identifying key design choices and also make all our code and pre-trained models publicly available.

Sreyan Ghosh, Samden Lepcha, S Sakshi et al.

Toxic speech, also known as hate speech, is regarded as one of the crucial issues plaguing online social media today. Most recent work on toxic speech detection is constrained to the modality of text and written conversations with very limited work on toxicity detection from spoken utterances or using the modality of speech. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset DeToxy, the first publicly available toxicity annotated dataset for the English language. DeToxy is sourced from various openly available speech databases and consists of over 2 million utterances. We believe that our dataset would act as a benchmark for the relatively new and un-explored Spoken Language Processing task of detecting toxicity from spoken utterances and boost further research in this space. Finally, we also provide strong unimodal baselines for our dataset and compare traditional two-step and E2E approaches. Our experiments show that in the case of spoken utterances, text-based approaches are largely dependent on gold human-annotated transcripts for their performance and also suffer from the problem of keyword bias. However, the presence of speech files in DeToxy helps facilitates the development of E2E speech models which alleviate both the above-stated problems by better capturing speech clues.

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar

Social network platforms are generally used to share positive, constructive, and insightful content. However, in recent times, people often get exposed to objectionable content like threat, identity attacks, hate speech, insults, obscene texts, offensive remarks or bullying. Existing work on toxic speech detection focuses on binary classification or on differentiating toxic speech among a small set of categories. This paper describes the system proposed by team Cisco for SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection, the first shared task focusing on detecting the spans in the text that attribute to its toxicity, in English language. We approach this problem primarily in two ways: a sequence tagging approach and a dependency parsing approach. In our sequence tagging approach we tag each token in a sentence under a particular tagging scheme. Our best performing architecture in this approach also proved to be our best performing architecture overall with an F1 score of 0.6922, thereby placing us 7th on the final evaluation phase leaderboard. We also explore a dependency parsing approach where we extract spans from the input sentence under the supervision of target span boundaries and rank our spans using a biaffine model. Finally, we also provide a detailed analysis of our results and model performance in our paper.

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Harsh Jalan et al.

This paper describes our proposed system for the AAAI-CAD21 shared task: Predicting Emphasis in Presentation Slides. In this specific task, given the contents of a slide we are asked to predict the degree of emphasis to be laid on each word in the slide. We propose 2 approaches to this problem including a BiLSTM-ELMo approach and a transformers based approach based on RoBERTa and XLNet architectures. We achieve a score of 0.518 on the evaluation leaderboard which ranks us 3rd and 0.543 on the post-evaluation leaderboard which ranks us 1st at the time of writing the paper.

Hemant Yadav, Sreyan Ghosh, Yi Yu et al.

Named entity recognition (NER) from text has been a widely studied problem and usually extracts semantic information from text. Until now, NER from speech is mostly studied in a two-step pipeline process that includes first applying an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system on an audio sample and then passing the predicted transcript to a NER tagger. In such cases, the error does not propagate from one step to another as both the tasks are not optimized in an end-to-end (E2E) fashion. Recent studies confirm that integrated approaches (e.g., E2E ASR) outperform sequential ones (e.g., phoneme based ASR). In this paper, we introduce a first publicly available NER annotated dataset for English speech and present an E2E approach, which jointly optimizes the ASR and NER tagger components. Experimental results show that the proposed E2E approach outperforms the classical two-step approach. We also discuss how NER from speech can be used to handle out of vocabulary (OOV) words in an ASR system.