Homa Fashandi

Anith Selvakumar, Homa Fashandi

Distance Metric Learning (DML) has typically dominated the audio-visual speaker verification problem space, owing to strong performance in new and unseen classes. In our work, we explored multitask learning techniques to further enhance DML, and show that an auxiliary task with even weak labels can increase the quality of the learned speaker representation without increasing model complexity during inference. We also extend the Generalized End-to-End Loss (GE2E) to multimodal inputs and demonstrate that it can achieve competitive performance in an audio-visual space. Finally, we introduce AV-Mixup, a multimodal augmentation technique during training time that has shown to reduce speaker overfit. Our network achieves state of the art performance for speaker verification, reporting 0.244%, 0.252%, 0.441% Equal Error Rate (EER) on the VoxCeleb1-O/E/H test sets, which is to our knowledge, the best published results on VoxCeleb1-E and VoxCeleb1-H.

Nikhil Verma, Manasa Bharadwaj, Wonjun Jang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined complex task automation with exceptional generalization capabilities. Despite these advancements, state-of-the-art methods rely on single-strategy prompting, missing the synergy of diverse reasoning approaches. No single strategy excels universally, highlighting the need for frameworks that fuse strategies to maximize performance and ensure robustness. We introduce the Select, Mix, and ReinvenT (SMaRT) framework, an innovative strategy fusion approach designed to overcome this constraint by creating balanced and efficient solutions through the seamless integration of diverse reasoning strategies. Unlike existing methods, which employ LLMs merely as evaluators, SMaRT uses them as intelligent integrators, unlocking the "best of all worlds" across tasks. Extensive empirical evaluations across benchmarks in reasoning, planning, and sequential decision-making highlight the robustness and adaptability of SMaRT. The framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in solution quality, constraint adherence, and performance metrics. This work redefines LLM-driven decision-making by pioneering a new paradigm in cross-strategy calibration, unlocking superior outcomes for reasoning systems and advancing the boundaries of self-refining methodologies.

Shengdong Zhang, Ehsan Nezhadarya, Homa Fashandi et al.

Batch Normalization (BN) is a popular technique for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). BN uses scaling and shifting to normalize activations of mini-batches to accelerate convergence and improve generalization. The recently proposed Iterative Normalization (IterNorm) method improves these properties by whitening the activations iteratively using Newton's method. However, since Newton's method initializes the whitening matrix independently at each training step, no information is shared between consecutive steps. In this work, instead of exact computation of whitening matrix at each time step, we estimate it gradually during training in an online fashion, using our proposed Stochastic Whitening Batch Normalization (SWBN) algorithm. We show that while SWBN improves the convergence rate and generalization of DNNs, its computational overhead is less than that of IterNorm. Due to the high efficiency of the proposed method, it can be easily employed in most DNN architectures with a large number of layers. We provide comprehensive experiments and comparisons between BN, IterNorm, and SWBN layers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in conventional (many-shot) image classification and few-shot classification tasks.