Speech & Audio

Audio source separation, recognition, and understanding.

Our current research focuses on application of machine learning to estimation and inference problems in speech and audio processing. Topics include end-to-end speech recognition and enhancement, acoustic modeling and analysis, statistical dialog systems, as well as natural language understanding and adaptive multimodal interfaces.

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  • Awards

    •  AWARD    MERL team wins the Listener Acoustic Personalisation (LAP) 2024 Challenge
      Date: August 29, 2024
      Awarded to: Yoshiki Masuyama, Gordon Wichern, Francois G. Germain, Christopher Ick, and Jonathan Le Roux
      MERL Contacts: François Germain; Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern; Yoshiki Masuyama
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL's Speech & Audio team ranked 1st out of 7 teams in Task 2 of the 1st SONICOM Listener Acoustic Personalisation (LAP) Challenge, which focused on "Spatial upsampling for obtaining a high-spatial-resolution HRTF from a very low number of directions". The team was led by Yoshiki Masuyama, and also included Gordon Wichern, Francois Germain, MERL intern Christopher Ick, and Jonathan Le Roux.

        The LAP Challenge workshop and award ceremony was hosted by the 32nd European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 24) on August 29, 2024 in Lyon, France. Yoshiki Masuyama presented the team's method, "Retrieval-Augmented Neural Field for HRTF Upsampling and Personalization", and received the award from Prof. Michele Geronazzo (University of Padova, IT, and Imperial College London, UK), Chair of the Challenge's Organizing Committee.

        The LAP challenge aims to explore challenges in the field of personalized spatial audio, with the first edition focusing on the spatial upsampling and interpolation of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). HRTFs with dense spatial grids are required for immersive audio experiences, but their recording is time-consuming. Although HRTF spatial upsampling has recently shown remarkable progress with approaches involving neural fields, HRTF estimation accuracy remains limited when upsampling from only a few measured directions, e.g., 3 or 5 measurements. The MERL team tackled this problem by proposing a retrieval-augmented neural field (RANF). RANF retrieves a subject whose HRTFs are close to those of the target subject at the measured directions from a library of subjects. The HRTF of the retrieved subject at the target direction is fed into the neural field in addition to the desired sound source direction. The team also developed a neural network architecture that can handle an arbitrary number of retrieved subjects, inspired by a multi-channel processing technique called transform-average-concatenate.
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    •  AWARD    Jonathan Le Roux elevated to IEEE Fellow
      Date: January 1, 2024
      Awarded to: Jonathan Le Roux
      MERL Contact: Jonathan Le Roux
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL Distinguished Scientist and Speech & Audio Senior Team Leader Jonathan Le Roux has been elevated to IEEE Fellow, effective January 2024, "for contributions to multi-source speech and audio processing."

        Mitsubishi Electric celebrated Dr. Le Roux's elevation and that of another researcher from the company, Dr. Shumpei Kameyama, with a worldwide news release on February 15.

        Dr. Jonathan Le Roux has made fundamental contributions to the field of multi-speaker speech processing, especially to the areas of speech separation and multi-speaker end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR). His contributions constituted a major advance in realizing a practically usable solution to the cocktail party problem, enabling machines to replicate humans’ ability to concentrate on a specific sound source, such as a certain speaker within a complex acoustic scene—a long-standing challenge in the speech signal processing community. Additionally, he has made key contributions to the measures used for training and evaluating audio source separation methods, developing several new objective functions to improve the training of deep neural networks for speech enhancement, and analyzing the impact of metrics used to evaluate the signal reconstruction quality. Dr. Le Roux’s technical contributions have been crucial in promoting the widespread adoption of multi-speaker separation and end-to-end ASR technologies across various applications, including smart speakers, teleconferencing systems, hearables, and mobile devices.

        IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership of the IEEE. It honors members with an outstanding record of technical achievements, contributing importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, and bringing significant value to society. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation.
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    •  AWARD    MERL team wins the Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement (AVSE) 2023 Challenge
      Date: December 16, 2023
      Awarded to: Zexu Pan, Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama, Francois Germain, Sameer Khurana, Chiori Hori, and Jonathan Le Roux
      MERL Contacts: François Germain; Chiori Hori; Sameer Khurana; Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern; Yoshiki Masuyama
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL's Speech & Audio team ranked 1st out of 12 teams in the 2nd COG-MHEAR Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement Challenge (AVSE). The team was led by Zexu Pan, and also included Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama, Francois Germain, Sameer Khurana, Chiori Hori, and Jonathan Le Roux.

        The AVSE challenge aims to design better speech enhancement systems by harnessing the visual aspects of speech (such as lip movements and gestures) in a manner similar to the brain’s multi-modal integration strategies. MERL’s system was a scenario-aware audio-visual TF-GridNet, that incorporates the face recording of a target speaker as a conditioning factor and also recognizes whether the predominant interference signal is speech or background noise. In addition to outperforming all competing systems in terms of objective metrics by a wide margin, in a listening test, MERL’s model achieved the best overall word intelligibility score of 84.54%, compared to 57.56% for the baseline and 80.41% for the next best team. The Fisher’s least significant difference (LSD) was 2.14%, indicating that our model offered statistically significant speech intelligibility improvements compared to all other systems.
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  • News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL Researchers to Present 2 Conference and 11 Workshop Papers at NeurIPS 2024
      Date: December 10, 2024 - December 15, 2024
      Where: Advances in Neural Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Matthew Brand; Ankush Chakrabarty; Anoop Cherian; François Germain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Christopher R. Laughman; Jonathan Le Roux; Jing Liu; Suhas Lohit; Tim K. Marks; Yoshiki Masuyama; Kieran Parsons; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Diego Romeres; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
      Brief
      • MERL researchers will attend and present the following papers at the 2024 Advances in Neural Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Conference and Workshops.

        1. "RETR: Multi-View Radar Detection Transformer for Indoor Perception" by Ryoma Yataka (Mitsubishi Electric), Adriano Cardace (Bologna University), Perry Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Petros Boufounos (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ryuhei Takahashi (Mitsubishi Electric). Main Conference. https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/poster/95530

        2. "Evaluating Large Vision-and-Language Models on Children's Mathematical Olympiads" by Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Joanna Matthiesen (Math Kangaroo USA), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Josh Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Main Conference, Datasets and Benchmarks track. https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/poster/97639

        3. "Probabilistic Forecasting for Building Energy Systems: Are Time-Series Foundation Models The Answer?" by Young-Jin Park (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), François G Germain (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Gordon Wichern (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Navid Azizan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Christopher R. Laughman (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Time Series in the Age of Large Models Workshop.

        4. "Forget to Flourish: Leveraging Model-Unlearning on Pretrained Language Models for Privacy Leakage" by Md Rafi Ur Rashid (Penn State University), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Shagufta Mehnaz (Penn State University), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Red Teaming GenAI: What Can We Learn from Adversaries?

        5. "Spatially-Aware Losses for Enhanced Neural Acoustic Fields" by Christopher Ick (New York University), Gordon Wichern (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Yoshiki Masuyama (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), François G Germain (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jonathan Le Roux (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Audio Imagination Workshop.

        6. "FV-NeRV: Neural Compression for Free Viewpoint Videos" by Sorachi Kato (Osaka University), Takuya Fujihashi (Osaka University), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Takashi Watanabe (Osaka University). Machine Learning and Compression Workshop.

        7. "GPT Sonography: Hand Gesture Decoding from Forearm Ultrasound Images via VLM" by Keshav Bimbraw (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). AIM-FM: Advancements In Medical Foundation Models: Explainability, Robustness, Security, and Beyond Workshop.

        8. "Smoothed Embeddings for Robust Language Models" by Hase Ryo (Mitsubishi Electric), Md Rafi Ur Rashid (Penn State University), Ashley Lewis (Ohio State University), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kieran Parsons (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Safe Generative AI Workshop.

        9. "Slaying the HyDRA: Parameter-Efficient Hyper Networks with Low-Displacement Rank Adaptation" by Xiangyu Chen (University of Kansas), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Matthew Brand (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Pu Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Adaptive Foundation Models.

        10. "Preference-based Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization with Gradients" by Joshua Hang Sai Ip (University of California Berkeley), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ali Mesbah (University of California Berkeley), Diego Romeres (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories). Workshop on Bayesian Decision-Making and Uncertainty. Lightning talk spotlight.

        11. "TR-BEACON: Shedding Light on Efficient Behavior Discovery in High-Dimensions with Trust-Region-based Bayesian Novelty Search" by Wei-Ting Tang (Ohio State University), Ankush Chakrabarty (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Joel A. Paulson (Ohio State University). Workshop on Bayesian Decision-Making and Uncertainty.

        12. "MEL-PETs Joint-Context Attack for the NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge Red Team Track" by Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Tsunato Nakai (Mitsubishi Electric), Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kento Oonishi (Mitsubishi Electric), Takuya Higashi (Mitsubishi Electric). LLM Privacy Challenge. Special Award for Practical Attack.

        13. "MEL-PETs Defense for the NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge Blue Team Track" by Jing Liu (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Ye Wang (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Toshiaki Koike-Akino (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Tsunato Nakai (Mitsubishi Electric), Kento Oonishi (Mitsubishi Electric), Takuya Higashi (Mitsubishi Electric). LLM Privacy Challenge. Won 3rd Place Award.

        MERL members also contributed to the organization of the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips24/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Tim K. Marks (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Juan Carlos Niebles (Salesforce AI Research), Petar Veličković (Google DeepMind).
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    •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2024] Samuel Clarke presents talk titled Audio for Object and Spatial Awareness
      Date & Time: Wednesday, October 30, 2024; 1:00 PM
      Speaker: Samuel Clarke, Stanford University
      MERL Host: Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Speech & Audio
      Abstract
      • Acoustic perception is invaluable to humans and robots in understanding objects and events in their environments. These sounds are dependent on properties of the source, the environment, and the receiver. Many humans possess remarkable intuition both to infer key properties of each of these three aspects from a sound and to form expectations of how these different aspects would affect the sound they hear. In order to equip robots and AI agents with similar if not stronger capabilities, our research has taken a two-fold path. First, we collect high-fidelity datasets in both controlled and uncontrolled environments which capture real sounds of objects and rooms. Second, we introduce differentiable physics-based models that can estimate acoustic properties of objects and rooms from minimal amounts of real audio data, then can predict new sounds from these objects and rooms under novel, “unseen” conditions.
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  • Research Highlights

  • Internships

    • SA0041: Internship - Audio separation, generation, and analysis

      We are seeking graduate students interested in helping advance the fields of generative audio, source separation, speech enhancement, spatial audio, and robust ASR in challenging multi-source and far-field scenarios. The interns will collaborate with MERL researchers to derive and implement new models and optimization methods, conduct experiments, and prepare results for publication. Internships regularly lead to one or more publications in top-tier venues, which can later become part of the intern's doctoral work.

      The ideal candidates are senior Ph.D. students with experience in some of the following: audio signal processing, microphone array processing, spatial audio reproduction, probabilistic modeling, deep generative modeling, and physics informed machine learning techniques (e.g., neural fields, PINNs, sound field and reverberation modeling).

      Multiple positions are available with flexible start dates (not just Spring/Summer but throughout 2025) and duration (typically 3-6 months).

    • SA0040: Internship - Sound event and anomaly detection

      We are seeking graduate students interested in helping advance the fields of sound event detection/localization, anomaly detection, and physics informed deep learning for machine sounds. The interns will collaborate with MERL researchers to derive and implement novel algorithms, record data, conduct experiments, integrate audio signals with other sensors (electrical, vision, vibration, etc.), and prepare results for publication. Internships regularly lead to one or more publications in top-tier venues, which can later become part of the intern's doctoral work.

      The ideal candidates are senior Ph.D. students with experience in some of the following: audio signal processing, microphone array processing, physics informed machine learning, outlier detection, and unsupervised learning.

      Multiple positions are available with flexible start dates (not just Spring/Summer but throughout 2025) and duration (typically 3-6 months).

    • CV0075: Internship - Multimodal Embodied AI

      MERL is looking for a self-motivated intern to work on problems at the intersection of multimodal large language models and embodied AI in dynamic indoor environments. The ideal candidate would be a PhD student with a strong background in machine learning and computer vision, as demonstrated by top-tier publications. The candidate must have prior experience in designing synthetic scenes (e.g., 3D games) using popular graphics software, embodied AI, large language models, reinforcement learning, and the use of simulators such as Habitat/SoundSpaces. Hands on experience in using animated 3D human shape models (e.g., SMPL and variants) is desired. The intern is expected to collaborate with researchers in computer vision at MERL to develop algorithms and prepare manuscripts for scientific publications.

      Required Specific Experience

      • Experience in designing 3D interactive scenes
      • Experience with vision based embodied AI using simulators (implementation on real robotic hardware would be a plus).
      • Experience training large language models on multimodal data
      • Experience with training reinforcement learning algorithms
      • Strong foundations in machine learning and programming
      • Strong track record of publications in top-tier computer vision and machine learning venues (such as CVPR, NeurIPS, etc.).


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  • Openings


    See All Openings at MERL

  • Recent Publications

    •  Cornell, S., Ebbers, J., Douwes, C., Martin-Morato, I., Harju, M., Mesaros, A., Serizel, R., "DCASE 2024 Task 4: Sound Event Detection with Heterogeneous Data and Missing Labels", Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) Workshop, October 2024, pp. 31-35.
      BibTeX TR2024-146 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Cornell2024oct,
      • author = {Cornell, Samuele and Ebbers, Janek and Douwes, Constance and Martin-Morato, Irene and Harju, Manu and Mesaros, Annamaria and Serizel, Romain}},
      • title = {DCASE 2024 Task 4: Sound Event Detection with Heterogeneous Data and Missing Labels},
      • booktitle = {Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) Workshop},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {31--35},
      • month = oct,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-146}
      • }
    •  Saijo, K., Wichern, G., Germain, F.G., Pan, Z., Le Roux, J., "TF-Locoformer: Transformer with Local Modeling by Convolution for Speech Separation and Enhancement", International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC), DOI: 10.1109/​IWAENC61483.2024.10694313, September 2024, pp. 205-209.
      BibTeX TR2024-126 PDF Software
      • @inproceedings{Saijo2024sep2,
      • author = {Saijo, Kohei and Wichern, Gordon and Germain, François G and Pan, Zexu and Le Roux, Jonathan}},
      • title = {TF-Locoformer: Transformer with Local Modeling by Convolution for Speech Separation and Enhancement},
      • booktitle = {International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {205--209},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.1109/IWAENC61483.2024.10694313},
      • issn = {2835-3439},
      • isbn = {979-8-3503-6185-8},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-126}
      • }
    •  Yin, J., Luo, A., Du, Y., Cherian, A., Marks, T.K., Le Roux, J., Gan, C., "Disentangled Acoustic Fields For Multimodal Physical Scene Understanding", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2024.
      BibTeX TR2024-125 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Yin2024sep,
      • author = {Yin, Jie and Luo, Andrew and Du, Yilun and Cherian, Anoop and Marks, Tim K. and Le Roux, Jonathan and Gan, Chuang}},
      • title = {Disentangled Acoustic Fields For Multimodal Physical Scene Understanding},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-125}
      • }
    •  Bahrman, L., Fontaine, M., Le Roux, J., Richard, G., "Speech Dereverberation Constrained on Room Impulse Response Characteristics", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/​Interspeech.2024-1173, September 2024, pp. 622-626.
      BibTeX TR2024-121 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Bahrman2024sep,
      • author = {Bahrman, Louis and Fontaine, Mathieu and Le Roux, Jonathan and Richard, Gaël}},
      • title = {Speech Dereverberation Constrained on Room Impulse Response Characteristics},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {622--626},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2024-1173},
      • issn = {2958-1796},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-121}
      • }
    •  Ebbers, J., Germain, F.G., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "Sound Event Bounding Boxes", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/​Interspeech.2024-2075, September 2024, pp. 562-566.
      BibTeX TR2024-118 PDF Software
      • @inproceedings{Ebbers2024sep,
      • author = {Ebbers, Janek and Germain, François G and Wichern, Gordon and Le Roux, Jonathan}},
      • title = {Sound Event Bounding Boxes},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {562--566},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2024-2075},
      • issn = {2958-1796},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-118}
      • }
    •  Khurana, S., Hori, C., Laurent, A., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "ZeroST: Zero-Shot Speech Translation", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/​Interspeech.2024-1088, September 2024, pp. 392-396.
      BibTeX TR2024-122 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Khurana2024sep,
      • author = {Khurana, Sameer and Hori, Chiori and Laurent, Antoine and Wichern, Gordon and Le Roux, Jonathan}},
      • title = {ZeroST: Zero-Shot Speech Translation},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {392--396},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2024-1088},
      • issn = {2958-1796},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-122}
      • }
    •  Pan, Z., Wichern, G., Germain, F.G., Saijo, K., Le Roux, J., "PARIS: Pseudo-AutoRegressIve Siamese Training for Online Speech Separation", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/​Interspeech.2024-1066, September 2024, pp. 582-586.
      BibTeX TR2024-124 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Pan2024sep,
      • author = {Pan, Zexu and Wichern, Gordon and Germain, François G and Saijo, Kohei and Le Roux, Jonathan}},
      • title = {PARIS: Pseudo-AutoRegressIve Siamese Training for Online Speech Separation},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {582--586},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2024-1066},
      • issn = {2958-1796},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-124}
      • }
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