Kaizhi Qian

Yonggan Fu, Yang Zhang, Kaizhi Qian et al. · mit

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for rich speech representations has achieved empirical success in low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and other speech processing tasks, which can mitigate the necessity of a large amount of transcribed speech and thus has driven a growing demand for on-device ASR and other speech processing. However, advanced speech SSL models have become increasingly large, which contradicts the limited on-device resources. This gap could be more severe in multilingual/multitask scenarios requiring simultaneously recognizing multiple languages or executing multiple speech processing tasks. Additionally, strongly overparameterized speech SSL models tend to suffer from overfitting when being finetuned on low-resource speech corpus. This work aims to enhance the practical usage of speech SSL models towards a win-win in both enhanced efficiency and alleviated overfitting via our proposed S$^3$-Router framework, which for the first time discovers that simply discarding no more than 10\% of model weights via only finetuning model connections of speech SSL models can achieve better accuracy over standard weight finetuning on downstream speech processing tasks. More importantly, S$^3$-Router can serve as an all-in-one technique to enable (1) a new finetuning scheme, (2) an efficient multilingual/multitask solution, (3) a state-of-the-art ASR pruning technique, and (4) a new tool to quantitatively analyze the learned speech representation. We believe S$^3$-Router has provided a new perspective for practical deployment of speech SSL models. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/S3-Router.

Kaizhi Qian, Yang Zhang, Heting Gao et al. · mit

Self-supervised learning in speech involves training a speech representation network on a large-scale unannotated speech corpus, and then applying the learned representations to downstream tasks. Since the majority of the downstream tasks of SSL learning in speech largely focus on the content information in speech, the most desirable speech representations should be able to disentangle unwanted variations, such as speaker variations, from the content. However, disentangling speakers is very challenging, because removing the speaker information could easily result in a loss of content as well, and the damage of the latter usually far outweighs the benefit of the former. In this paper, we propose a new SSL method that can achieve speaker disentanglement without severe loss of content. Our approach is adapted from the HuBERT framework, and incorporates disentangling mechanisms to regularize both the teacher labels and the learned representations. We evaluate the benefit of speaker disentanglement on a set of content-related downstream tasks, and observe a consistent and notable performance advantage of our speaker-disentangled representations.

Chak Ho Chan, Kaizhi Qian, Yang Zhang et al.

SpeechSplit can perform aspect-specific voice conversion by disentangling speech into content, rhythm, pitch, and timbre using multiple autoencoders in an unsupervised manner. However, SpeechSplit requires careful tuning of the autoencoder bottlenecks, which can be time-consuming and less robust. This paper proposes SpeechSplit 2.0, which constrains the information flow of the speech component to be disentangled on the autoencoder input using efficient signal processing methods instead of bottleneck tuning. Evaluation results show that SpeechSplit 2.0 achieves comparable performance to SpeechSplit in speech disentanglement and superior robustness to the bottleneck size variations. Our code is available at https://github.com/biggytruck/SpeechSplit2.

Bairu Hou, Yujian Liu, Kaizhi Qian et al.

Uncertainty decomposition refers to the task of decomposing the total uncertainty of a predictive model into aleatoric (data) uncertainty, resulting from inherent randomness in the data-generating process, and epistemic (model) uncertainty, resulting from missing information in the model's training data. In large language models (LLMs) specifically, identifying sources of uncertainty is an important step toward improving reliability, trustworthiness, and interpretability, but remains an important open research question. In this paper, we introduce an uncertainty decomposition framework for LLMs, called input clarification ensembling, which can be applied to any pre-trained LLM. Our approach generates a set of clarifications for the input, feeds them into an LLM, and ensembles the corresponding predictions. We show that, when aleatoric uncertainty arises from ambiguity or under-specification in LLM inputs, this approach makes it possible to factor an (unclarified) LLM's predictions into separate aleatoric and epistemic terms, using a decomposition similar to the one employed by Bayesian neural networks. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that input clarification ensembling provides accurate and reliable uncertainty quantification on several language processing tasks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/llm_uncertainty.

Kun Su, Kaizhi Qian, Eli Shlizerman et al.

Modeling sounds emitted from physical object interactions is critical for immersive perceptual experiences in real and virtual worlds. Traditional methods of impact sound synthesis use physics simulation to obtain a set of physics parameters that could represent and synthesize the sound. However, they require fine details of both the object geometries and impact locations, which are rarely available in the real world and can not be applied to synthesize impact sounds from common videos. On the other hand, existing video-driven deep learning-based approaches could only capture the weak correspondence between visual content and impact sounds since they lack of physics knowledge. In this work, we propose a physics-driven diffusion model that can synthesize high-fidelity impact sound for a silent video clip. In addition to the video content, we propose to use additional physics priors to guide the impact sound synthesis procedure. The physics priors include both physics parameters that are directly estimated from noisy real-world impact sound examples without sophisticated setup and learned residual parameters that interpret the sound environment via neural networks. We further implement a novel diffusion model with specific training and inference strategies to combine physics priors and visual information for impact sound synthesis. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several existing systems in generating realistic impact sounds. More importantly, the physics-based representations are fully interpretable and transparent, thus enabling us to perform sound editing flexibly.

Zhongzhi Yu, Yang Zhang, Kaizhi Qian et al.

Despite the impressive performance recently achieved by automatic speech recognition (ASR), we observe two primary challenges that hinder its broader applications: (1) The difficulty of introducing scalability into the model to support more languages with limited training, inference, and storage overhead; (2) The low-resource adaptation ability that enables effective low-resource adaptation while avoiding over-fitting and catastrophic forgetting issues. Inspired by recent findings, we hypothesize that we can address the above challenges with modules widely shared across languages. To this end, we propose an ASR framework, dubbed \METHODNS, that, \textit{for the first time}, simultaneously achieves strong multilingual scalability and low-resource adaptation ability thanks to its modularize-then-assemble strategy. Specifically, \METHOD learns a small set of generalizable sub-modules and adaptively assembles them for different languages to reduce the multilingual overhead and enable effective knowledge transfer for low-resource adaptation. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that \METHOD can effectively discover language similarity and improve multilingual and low-resource ASR performance over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, e.g., under multilingual-ASR, our framework achieves a 0.13$\sim$2.41 lower character error rate (CER) with 30\% smaller inference overhead over SOTA solutions on multilingual ASR and a comparable CER, with nearly 50 times fewer trainable parameters over SOTA solutions on low-resource tuning, respectively.

Bairu Hou, Yang Zhang, Jiabao Ji et al.

We present ThinkPrune, a simple yet effective method for pruning the thinking length for long-thinking LLMs, which has been found to often produce inefficient and redundant thinking processes. Existing preliminary explorations of reducing thinking length primarily focus on forcing the thinking process to early exit, rather than adapting the LLM to optimize and consolidate the thinking process, and therefore the length-performance tradeoff observed so far is sub-optimal. To fill this gap, ThinkPrune offers a simple solution that continuously trains the long-thinking LLMs via reinforcement learning (RL) with an added token limit, beyond which any unfinished thoughts and answers will be discarded, resulting in a zero reward. To further preserve model performance, we introduce an iterative length pruning approach, where multiple rounds of RL are conducted, each with an increasingly more stringent token limit. We observed that ThinkPrune results in a remarkable performance-length tradeoff -- on the AIME24 dataset, the reasoning length of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B can be reduced by half with only 2% drop in performance. We also observed that after pruning, the LLMs can bypass unnecessary steps while keeping the core reasoning process complete. Code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/ThinkPrune.

Wensu Li, Atin Aboutorabi, Harry Lyu et al.

This paper develops a unified framework for evaluating the optimal degree of task automation. Moving beyond binary automate-or-not assessments, we model automation intensity as a continuous choice in which firms minimize costs by selecting an AI accuracy level, from no automation through partial human-AI collaboration to full automation. On the supply side, we estimate an AI production function via scaling-law experiments linking performance to data, compute, and model size. Because AI systems exhibit predictable but diminishing returns to these inputs, the cost of higher accuracy is convex: good performance may be inexpensive, but near-perfect accuracy is disproportionately costly. Full automation is therefore often not cost-minimizing; partial automation, where firms retain human workers for residual tasks, frequently emerges as the equilibrium. On the demand side, we introduce an entropy-based measure of task complexity that maps model accuracy into a labor substitution ratio, quantifying human labor displacement at each accuracy level. We calibrate the framework with O*NET task data, a survey of 3,778 domain experts, and GPT-4o-derived task decompositions, implementing it in computer vision. Task complexity shapes substitution: low-complexity tasks see high substitution, while high-complexity tasks favor limited partial automation. Scale of deployment is a key determinant: AI-as-a-Service and AI agents spread fixed costs across users, sharply expanding economically viable tasks. At the firm level, cost-effective automation captures approximately 11% of computer-vision-exposed labor compensation; under economy-wide deployment, this share rises sharply. Since other AI systems exhibit similar scaling-law economics, our mechanisms extend beyond computer vision, reinforcing that partial automation is often the economically rational long-run outcome, not merely a transitional phase.

Heting Gao, Junrui Ni, Kaizhi Qian et al.

Large-scale auto-regressive language models pretrained on massive text have demonstrated their impressive ability to perform new natural language tasks with only a few text examples, without the need for fine-tuning. Recent studies further show that such a few-shot learning ability can be extended to the text-image setting by training an encoder to encode the images into embeddings functioning like the text embeddings of the language model. Interested in exploring the possibility of transferring the few-shot learning ability to the audio-text setting, we propose a novel speech understanding framework, WavPrompt, where we finetune a wav2vec model to generate a sequence of audio embeddings understood by the language model. We show that WavPrompt is a few-shot learner that can perform speech understanding tasks better than a naive text baseline. We conduct detailed ablation studies on different components and hyperparameters to empirically identify the best model configuration. In addition, we conduct a non-speech understanding experiment to show WavPrompt can extract more information than just the transcriptions. Code is available at https://github.com/Hertin/WavPrompt

Junrui Ni, Liming Wang, Heting Gao et al.

An unsupervised text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) system learns to generate speech waveforms corresponding to any written sentence in a language by observing: 1) a collection of untranscribed speech waveforms in that language; 2) a collection of texts written in that language without access to any transcribed speech. Developing such a system can significantly improve the availability of speech technology to languages without a large amount of parallel speech and text data. This paper proposes an unsupervised TTS system based on an alignment module that outputs pseudo-text and another synthesis module that uses pseudo-text for training and real text for inference. Our unsupervised system can achieve comparable performance to the supervised system in seven languages with about 10-20 hours of speech each. A careful study on the effect of text units and vocoders has also been conducted to better understand what factors may affect unsupervised TTS performance. The samples generated by our models can be found at https://cactuswiththoughts.github.io/UnsupTTS-Demo, and our code can be found at https://github.com/lwang114/UnsupTTS.

Kaizhi Qian, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang et al.

Speech information can be roughly decomposed into four components: language content, timbre, pitch, and rhythm. Obtaining disentangled representations of these components is useful in many speech analysis and generation applications. Recently, state-of-the-art voice conversion systems have led to speech representations that can disentangle speaker-dependent and independent information. However, these systems can only disentangle timbre, while information about pitch, rhythm and content is still mixed together. Further disentangling the remaining speech components is an under-determined problem in the absence of explicit annotations for each component, which are difficult and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose SpeechSplit, which can blindly decompose speech into its four components by introducing three carefully designed information bottlenecks. SpeechSplit is among the first algorithms that can separately perform style transfer on timbre, pitch and rhythm without text labels. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/auspicious3000/SpeechSplit.

Xinyi Gao, Qiucheng Wu, Lu Ding et al.

Educational Question Generation (EQG) aims to synthesize customized exercise questions that enhance student learning. An effective EQG system should ideally personalize questions for each student by modeling the student's knowledge state and generating questions that provide the greatest learning benefit. However, few existing EQG approaches are able to achieve such fine-grained personalization. In this paper, we explore how EQG can benefit from knowledge tracing (KT), which models students' knowledge states based on historical performance and predicts future performance. We propose KT4EQG, a personalized EQG framework that generates effective questions for individual students under the guidance of a KT model. Specifically, KT4EQG seeks to maximize a student's potential improvement in overall knowledge mastery by leveraging the KT model to select the most suitable knowledge concept for the student to practice. An LLM-based question generator is then trained to produce a question faithfully grounded in the selected concept. Experimental results on XES3G5M and MOOCRadar show that KT4EQG consistently generates more effective questions than methods with limited or no personalization.

Kaizhi Qian, Xulin Fan, Junrui Ni et al.

Speech language models refer to language models with speech processing and understanding capabilities. One key desirable capability for speech language models is the ability to capture the intricate interdependency between content and prosody. The existing mainstream paradigm of training speech language models, which converts speech into discrete tokens before feeding them into LLMs, is sub-optimal in learning prosody information -- we find that the resulting LLMs do not exhibit obvious emerging prosody processing capabilities via pre-training alone. To overcome this, we propose ProsodyLM, which introduces a simple tokenization scheme amenable to learning prosody. Each speech utterance is first transcribed into text, followed by a sequence of word-level prosody tokens. Compared with conventional speech tokenization schemes, the proposed tokenization scheme retains more complete prosody information, and is more understandable to text-based LLMs. We find that ProsodyLM can learn surprisingly diverse emerging prosody processing capabilities through pre-training alone, ranging from harnessing the prosody nuances in generated speech, such as contrastive focus, understanding emotion and stress in an utterance, to maintaining prosody consistency in long contexts.

Xinyi Gao, Qiucheng Wu, Yang Zhang et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to estimate a student's evolving knowledge state and predict their performance on new exercises based on performance history. Many realistic classroom settings for KT are typically low-resource in data and require online updates as students' exercise history grows, which creates significant challenges for existing KT approaches. To restore strong performance under low-resource conditions, we revisit the hierarchical knowledge concept (KC) information, which is typically available in many classroom settings and can provide strong prior when data are sparse. We therefore propose Knowledge-Tree-based Knowledge Tracing (KT$^2$), a probabilistic KT framework that models student understanding over a tree-structured hierarchy of knowledge concepts using a Hidden Markov Tree Model. KT$^2$ estimates student mastery via an EM algorithm and supports personalized prediction through an incremental update mechanism as new responses arrive. Our experiments show that KT$^2$ consistently outperforms strong baselines in realistic online, low-resource settings.

Wei Fang, Yang Zhang, Kaizhi Qian et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated with specialized external tools, yet many tasks demand zero-shot tool usage with minimal or noisy documentation. Existing solutions rely on manual rewriting or labeled data for validation, making them inapplicable in true zero-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose PLAY2PROMPT, an automated framework that systematically "plays" with each tool to explore its input-output behaviors. Through this iterative trial-and-error process, PLAY2PROMPT refines tool documentation and generates usage examples without any labeled data. These examples not only guide LLM inference but also serve as validation to further enhance tool utilization. Extensive experiments on real-world tasks demonstrate that PLAY2PROMPT significantly improves zero-shot tool performance across both open and closed models, offering a scalable and effective solution for domain-specific tool integration.

Junrui Ni, Liming Wang, Yang Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in supervised automatic speech recognition (ASR) have achieved remarkable performance, largely due to the growing availability of large transcribed speech corpora. However, most languages lack sufficient paired speech and text data to effectively train these systems. In this article, we tackle the challenge of developing ASR systems without paired speech and text corpora by proposing the removal of reliance on a phoneme lexicon. We explore a new research direction: word-level unsupervised ASR, and experimentally demonstrate that an unsupervised speech recognizer can emerge from joint speech-to-speech and text-to-text masked token-infilling. Using a curated speech corpus containing a fixed number of English words, our system iteratively refines the word segmentation structure and achieves a word error rate of between 20-23%, depending on the vocabulary size, without parallel transcripts, oracle word boundaries, or a pronunciation lexicon. This innovative model surpasses the performance of previous unsupervised ASR models under the lexicon-free setting.

Cheng-I Jeff Lai, Erica Cooper, Yang Zhang et al.

Are end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) models over-parametrized? To what extent can these models be pruned, and what happens to their synthesis capabilities? This work serves as a starting point to explore pruning both spectrogram prediction networks and vocoders. We thoroughly investigate the tradeoffs between sparsity and its subsequent effects on synthetic speech. Additionally, we explored several aspects of TTS pruning: amount of finetuning data versus sparsity, TTS-Augmentation to utilize unspoken text, and combining knowledge distillation and pruning. Our findings suggest that not only are end-to-end TTS models highly prunable, but also, perhaps surprisingly, pruned TTS models can produce synthetic speech with equal or higher naturalness and intelligibility, with similar prosody. All of our experiments are conducted on publicly available models, and findings in this work are backed by large-scale subjective tests and objective measures. Code and 200 pruned models are made available to facilitate future research on efficiency in TTS.

Kaizhi Qian, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang et al.

Prosody plays an important role in characterizing the style of a speaker or an emotion, but most non-parallel voice or emotion style transfer algorithms do not convert any prosody information. Two major components of prosody are pitch and rhythm. Disentangling the prosody information, particularly the rhythm component, from the speech is challenging because it involves breaking the synchrony between the input speech and the disentangled speech representation. As a result, most existing prosody style transfer algorithms would need to rely on some form of text transcriptions to identify the content information, which confines their application to high-resource languages only. Recently, SpeechSplit has made sizeable progress towards unsupervised prosody style transfer, but it is unable to extract high-level global prosody style in an unsupervised manner. In this paper, we propose AutoPST, which can disentangle global prosody style from speech without relying on any text transcriptions. AutoPST is an Autoencoder-based Prosody Style Transfer framework with a thorough rhythm removal module guided by the self-expressive representation learning. Experiments on different style transfer tasks show that AutoPST can effectively convert prosody that correctly reflects the styles of the target domains.

Cheng-I Jeff Lai, Yang Zhang, Alexander H. Liu et al.

Self-supervised speech representation learning (speech SSL) has demonstrated the benefit of scale in learning rich representations for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with limited paired data, such as wav2vec 2.0. We investigate the existence of sparse subnetworks in pre-trained speech SSL models that achieve even better low-resource ASR results. However, directly applying widely adopted pruning methods such as the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) is suboptimal in the computational cost needed. Moreover, we show that the discovered subnetworks yield minimal performance gain compared to the original dense network. We present Prune-Adjust-Re-Prune (PARP), which discovers and finetunes subnetworks for much better performance, while only requiring a single downstream ASR finetuning run. PARP is inspired by our surprising observation that subnetworks pruned for pre-training tasks need merely a slight adjustment to achieve a sizeable performance boost in downstream ASR tasks. Extensive experiments on low-resource ASR verify (1) sparse subnetworks exist in mono-lingual/multi-lingual pre-trained speech SSL, and (2) the computational advantage and performance gain of PARP over baseline pruning methods. In particular, on the 10min Librispeech split without LM decoding, PARP discovers subnetworks from wav2vec 2.0 with an absolute 10.9%/12.6% WER decrease compared to the full model. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of PARP via: cross-lingual pruning without any phone recognition degradation, the discovery of a multi-lingual subnetwork for 10 spoken languages in 1 finetuning run, and its applicability to pre-trained BERT/XLNet for natural language tasks.

Mark R. Saddler, Andrew Francl, Jenelle Feather et al.

Contemporary speech enhancement predominantly relies on audio transforms that are trained to reconstruct a clean speech waveform. The development of high-performing neural network sound recognition systems has raised the possibility of using deep feature representations as 'perceptual' losses with which to train denoising systems. We explored their utility by first training deep neural networks to classify either spoken words or environmental sounds from audio. We then trained an audio transform to map noisy speech to an audio waveform that minimized the difference in the deep feature representations between the output audio and the corresponding clean audio. The resulting transforms removed noise substantially better than baseline methods trained to reconstruct clean waveforms, and also outperformed previous methods using deep feature losses. However, a similar benefit was obtained simply by using losses derived from the filter bank inputs to the deep networks. The results show that deep features can guide speech enhancement, but suggest that they do not yet outperform simple alternatives that do not involve learned features.

Kaizhi Qian, Zeyu Jin, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson et al.

Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion remains an interesting but challenging speech processing task. Many style-transfer-inspired methods such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) have been proposed. Recently, AutoVC, a conditional autoencoders (CAEs) based method achieved state-of-the-art results by disentangling the speaker identity and speech content using information-constraining bottlenecks, and it achieves zero-shot conversion by swapping in a different speaker's identity embedding to synthesize a new voice. However, we found that while speaker identity is disentangled from speech content, a significant amount of prosodic information, such as source F0, leaks through the bottleneck, causing target F0 to fluctuate unnaturally. Furthermore, AutoVC has no control of the converted F0 and thus unsuitable for many applications. In the paper, we modified and improved autoencoder-based voice conversion to disentangle content, F0, and speaker identity at the same time. Therefore, we can control the F0 contour, generate speech with F0 consistent with the target speaker, and significantly improve quality and similarity. We support our improvement through quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang, Mo Yu et al.

There are two major paradigms of white-box adversarial attacks that attempt to impose input perturbations. The first paradigm, called the fix-perturbation attack, crafts adversarial samples within a given perturbation level. The second paradigm, called the zero-confidence attack, finds the smallest perturbation needed to cause mis-classification, also known as the margin of an input feature. While the former paradigm is well-resolved, the latter is not. Existing zero-confidence attacks either introduce significant ap-proximation errors, or are too time-consuming. We therefore propose MARGINATTACK, a zero-confidence attack framework that is able to compute the margin with improved accuracy and efficiency. Our experiments show that MARGINATTACK is able to compute a smaller margin than the state-of-the-art zero-confidence attacks, and matches the state-of-the-art fix-perturbation at-tacks. In addition, it runs significantly faster than the Carlini-Wagner attack, currently the most ac-curate zero-confidence attack algorithm.

Kaizhi Qian, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang et al.

Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion, as well as zero-shot voice conversion, remain under-explored areas. Deep style transfer algorithms, such as generative adversarial networks (GAN) and conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE), are being applied as new solutions in this field. However, GAN training is sophisticated and difficult, and there is no strong evidence that its generated speech is of good perceptual quality. On the other hand, CVAE training is simple but does not come with the distribution-matching property of a GAN. In this paper, we propose a new style transfer scheme that involves only an autoencoder with a carefully designed bottleneck. We formally show that this scheme can achieve distribution-matching style transfer by training only on a self-reconstruction loss. Based on this scheme, we proposed AUTOVC, which achieves state-of-the-art results in many-to-many voice conversion with non-parallel data, and which is the first to perform zero-shot voice conversion.

Kaizhi Qian, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang et al.

Multi-channel speech enhancement with ad-hoc sensors has been a challenging task. Speech model guided beamforming algorithms are able to recover natural sounding speech, but the speech models tend to be oversimplified or the inference would otherwise be too complicated. On the other hand, deep learning based enhancement approaches are able to learn complicated speech distributions and perform efficient inference, but they are unable to deal with variable number of input channels. Also, deep learning approaches introduce a lot of errors, particularly in the presence of unseen noise types and settings. We have therefore proposed an enhancement framework called DEEPBEAM, which combines the two complementary classes of algorithms. DEEPBEAM introduces a beamforming filter to produce natural sounding speech, but the filter coefficients are determined with the help of a monaural speech enhancement neural network. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that DEEPBEAM is able to produce clean, dry and natural sounding speech, and is robust against unseen noise.