Chen, Junkun
Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs
Microsoft, null, :, null, Abouelenin, Abdelrahman, Ashfaq, Atabak, Atkinson, Adam, Awadalla, Hany, Bach, Nguyen, Bao, Jianmin, Benhaim, Alon, Cai, Martin, Chaudhary, Vishrav, Chen, Congcong, Chen, Dong, Chen, Dongdong, Chen, Junkun, Chen, Weizhu, Chen, Yen-Chun, Chen, Yi-ling, Dai, Qi, Dai, Xiyang, Fan, Ruchao, Gao, Mei, Gao, Min, Garg, Amit, Goswami, Abhishek, Hao, Junheng, Hendy, Amr, Hu, Yuxuan, Jin, Xin, Khademi, Mahmoud, Kim, Dongwoo, Kim, Young Jin, Lee, Gina, Li, Jinyu, Li, Yunsheng, Liang, Chen, Lin, Xihui, Lin, Zeqi, Liu, Mengchen, Liu, Yang, Lopez, Gilsinia, Luo, Chong, Madan, Piyush, Mazalov, Vadim, Mitra, Arindam, Mousavi, Ali, Nguyen, Anh, Pan, Jing, Perez-Becker, Daniel, Platin, Jacob, Portet, Thomas, Qiu, Kai, Ren, Bo, Ren, Liliang, Roy, Sambuddha, Shang, Ning, Shen, Yelong, Singhal, Saksham, Som, Subhojit, Song, Xia, Sych, Tetyana, Vaddamanu, Praneetha, Wang, Shuohang, Wang, Yiming, Wang, Zhenghao, Wu, Haibin, Xu, Haoran, Xu, Weijian, Yang, Yifan, Yang, Ziyi, Yu, Donghan, Zabir, Ishmam, Zhang, Jianwen, Zhang, Li Lyna, Zhang, Yunan, Zhou, Xiren
We introduce Phi-4-Mini and Phi-4-Multimodal, compact yet highly capable language and multimodal models. Phi-4-Mini is a 3.8-billion-parameter language model trained on high-quality web and synthetic data, significantly outperforming recent open-source models of similar size and matching the performance of models twice its size on math and coding tasks requiring complex reasoning. This achievement is driven by a carefully curated synthetic data recipe emphasizing high-quality math and coding datasets. Compared to its predecessor, Phi-3.5-Mini, Phi-4-Mini features an expanded vocabulary size of 200K tokens to better support multilingual applications, as well as group query attention for more efficient long-sequence generation. Phi-4-Multimodal is a multimodal model that integrates text, vision, and speech/audio input modalities into a single model. Its novel modality extension approach leverages LoRA adapters and modality-specific routers to allow multiple inference modes combining various modalities without interference. For example, it now ranks first in the OpenASR leaderboard to date, although the LoRA component of the speech/audio modality has just 460 million parameters. Phi-4-Multimodal supports scenarios involving (vision + language), (vision + speech), and (speech/audio) inputs, outperforming larger vision-language and speech-language models on a wide range of tasks. Additionally, we experiment to further train Phi-4-Mini to enhance its reasoning capabilities. Despite its compact 3.8-billion-parameter size, this experimental version achieves reasoning performance on par with or surpassing significantly larger models, including DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B.
Streaming Speaker Change Detection and Gender Classification for Transducer-Based Multi-Talker Speech Translation
Wang, Peidong, Kanda, Naoyuki, Xue, Jian, Li, Jinyu, Wang, Xiaofei, Subramanian, Aswin Shanmugam, Chen, Junkun, Sivasankaran, Sunit, Xiao, Xiong, Zhao, Yong
Streaming multi-talker speech translation is a task that involves not only generating accurate and fluent translations with low latency but also recognizing when a speaker change occurs and what the speaker's gender is. Speaker change information can be used to create audio prompts for a zero-shot text-to-speech system, and gender can help to select speaker profiles in a conventional text-to-speech model. We propose to tackle streaming speaker change detection and gender classification by incorporating speaker embeddings into a transducer-based streaming end-to-end speech translation model. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve high accuracy for both speaker change detection and gender classification.
Isochrony-Controlled Speech-to-Text Translation: A study on translating from Sino-Tibetan to Indo-European Languages
Yousefi, Midia, Qian, Yao, Chen, Junkun, Wang, Gang, Liu, Yanqing, Wang, Dongmei, Wang, Xiaofei, Xue, Jian
End-to-end speech translation (ST), which translates source language speech directly into target language text, has garnered significant attention in recent years. Many ST applications require strict length control to ensure that the translation duration matches the length of the source audio, including both speech and pause segments. Previous methods often controlled the number of words or characters generated by the Machine Translation model to approximate the source sentence's length without considering the isochrony of pauses and speech segments, as duration can vary between languages. To address this, we present improvements to the duration alignment component of our sequence-to-sequence ST model. Our method controls translation length by predicting the duration of speech and pauses in conjunction with the translation process. This is achieved by providing timing information to the decoder, ensuring it tracks the remaining duration for speech and pauses while generating the translation. The evaluation on the Zh-En test set of CoVoST 2, demonstrates that the proposed Isochrony-Controlled ST achieves 0.92 speech overlap and 8.9 BLEU, which has only a 1.4 BLEU drop compared to the ST baseline.
Soft Language Identification for Language-Agnostic Many-to-One End-to-End Speech Translation
Wang, Peidong, Xue, Jian, Li, Jinyu, Chen, Junkun, Subramanian, Aswin Shanmugam
Language-agnostic many-to-one end-to-end speech translation models can convert audio signals from different source languages into text in a target language. These models do not need source language identification, which improves user experience. In some cases, the input language can be given or estimated. Our goal is to use this additional language information while preserving the quality of the other languages. We accomplish this by introducing a simple and effective linear input network. The linear input network is initialized as an identity matrix, which ensures that the model can perform as well as, or better than, the original model. Experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully enhance the specified language, while keeping the language-agnostic ability of the many-to-one ST models.
DiariST: Streaming Speech Translation with Speaker Diarization
Yang, Mu, Kanda, Naoyuki, Wang, Xiaofei, Chen, Junkun, Wang, Peidong, Xue, Jian, Li, Jinyu, Yoshioka, Takuya
End-to-end speech translation (ST) for conversation recordings involves several under-explored challenges such as speaker diarization (SD) without accurate word time stamps and handling of overlapping speech in a streaming fashion. In this work, we propose DiariST, the first streaming ST and SD solution. It is built upon a neural transducer-based streaming ST system and integrates token-level serialized output training and t-vector, which were originally developed for multi-talker speech recognition. Due to the absence of evaluation benchmarks in this area, we develop a new evaluation dataset, DiariST-AliMeeting, by translating the reference Chinese transcriptions of the AliMeeting corpus into English. We also propose new metrics, called speaker-agnostic BLEU and speaker-attributed BLEU, to measure the ST quality while taking SD accuracy into account. Our system achieves a strong ST and SD capability compared to offline systems based on Whisper, while performing streaming inference for overlapping speech. To facilitate the research in this new direction, we release the evaluation data, the offline baseline systems, and the evaluation code.
Leveraging Timestamp Information for Serialized Joint Streaming Recognition and Translation
Papi, Sara, Wang, Peidong, Chen, Junkun, Xue, Jian, Kanda, Naoyuki, Li, Jinyu, Gaur, Yashesh
The growing need for instant spoken language transcription and translation is driven by increased global communication and cross-lingual interactions. This has made offering translations in multiple languages essential for user applications. Traditional approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) have often relied on separate systems, leading to inefficiencies in computational resources, and increased synchronization complexity in real time. In this paper, we propose a streaming Transformer-Transducer (T-T) model able to jointly produce many-to-one and one-to-many transcription and translation using a single decoder. We introduce a novel method for joint token-level serialized output training based on timestamp information to effectively produce ASR and ST outputs in the streaming setting. Experiments on {it,es,de}->en prove the effectiveness of our approach, enabling the generation of one-to-many joint outputs with a single decoder for the first time.
Improving Stability in Simultaneous Speech Translation: A Revision-Controllable Decoding Approach
Chen, Junkun, Xue, Jian, Wang, Peidong, Pan, Jing, Li, Jinyu
Simultaneous Speech-to-Text translation serves a critical role in real-time crosslingual communication. Despite the advancements in recent years, challenges remain in achieving stability in the translation process, a concern primarily manifested in the flickering of partial results. In this paper, we propose a novel revision-controllable method designed to address this issue. Our method introduces an allowed revision window within the beam search pruning process to screen out candidate translations likely to cause extensive revisions, leading to a substantial reduction in flickering and, crucially, providing the capability to completely eliminate flickering. The experiments demonstrate the proposed method can significantly improve the decoding stability without compromising substantially on the translation quality.
Token-Level Serialized Output Training for Joint Streaming ASR and ST Leveraging Textual Alignments
Papi, Sara, Wang, Peidong, Chen, Junkun, Xue, Jian, Li, Jinyu, Gaur, Yashesh
ABSTRACT In real-world applications, users often require both translations and transcriptions of speech to enhance their comprehension, particularly in streaming scenarios where incremental generation is necessary. This paper introduces a streaming Transformer-Transducer that jointly generates automatic Figure 1. To produce ASR and ST content effectively with minimal latency, we propose a joint token-level serialized output training method that interleaves source and target while incrementally receiving additional speech content. Experiments particular, only Weller et al., 2021 [10] proposed a unifieddecoder in monolingual (it-en) and multilingual ({de,es,it}- solution for real-time applications that, however, en) settings demonstrate that our approach achieves the best leverages a fully attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) architecture quality-latency balance. With an average ASR latency of 1s [11], which is theoretically not well suited for and ST latency of 1.3s, our model shows no degradation or the streaming scenario [12], and adopts the re-translation even improves output quality compared to separate ASR and approach [13], which is well-known to be affected by the ST models, yielding an average improvement of 1.1 WER and flickering problem [14].
ERNIE-SAT: Speech and Text Joint Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Multi-Speaker Text-to-Speech
Fan, Xiaoran, Pang, Chao, Yuan, Tian, Bai, He, Zheng, Renjie, Zhu, Pengfei, Wang, Shuohuan, Chen, Junkun, Chen, Zeyu, Huang, Liang, Sun, Yu, Wu, Hua
Speech representation learning has improved both speech understanding and speech synthesis tasks for single language. However, its ability in cross-lingual scenarios has not been explored. In this paper, we extend the pretraining method for cross-lingual multi-speaker speech synthesis tasks, including cross-lingual multi-speaker voice cloning and cross-lingual multi-speaker speech editing. We propose a speech-text joint pretraining framework, where we randomly mask the spectrogram and the phonemes given a speech example and its transcription. By learning to reconstruct the masked parts of the input in different languages, our model shows great improvements over speaker-embedding-based multi-speaker TTS methods. Moreover, our framework is end-to-end for both the training and the inference without any finetuning effort. In cross-lingual multi-speaker voice cloning and cross-lingual multi-speaker speech editing tasks, our experiments show that our model outperforms speaker-embedding-based multi-speaker TTS methods.
RNNLogic: Learning Logic Rules for Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs
Qu, Meng, Chen, Junkun, Xhonneux, Louis-Pascal, Bengio, Yoshua, Tang, Jian
This paper studies learning logic rules for reasoning on knowledge graphs. Logic rules provide interpretable explanations when used for prediction as well as being able to generalize to other tasks, and hence are critical to learn. Existing methods either suffer from the problem of searching in a large search space (e.g., neural logic programming) or ineffective optimization due to sparse rewards (e.g., techniques based on reinforcement learning). To address these limitations, this paper proposes a probabilistic model called RNNLogic. RNNLogic treats logic rules as a latent variable, and simultaneously trains a rule generator as well as a reasoning predictor with logic rules. We develop an EM-based algorithm for optimization. In each iteration, the reasoning predictor is first updated to explore some generated logic rules for reasoning. Then in the E-step, we select a set of high-quality rules from all generated rules with both the rule generator and reasoning predictor via posterior inference; and in the M-step, the rule generator is updated with the rules selected in the E-step. Experiments on four datasets prove the effectiveness of RNNLogic.