IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing

Most current models for analyzing multimodal sequences often disregard the imbalanced contributions of individual modal representations caused by varying information densities, as well as the inherent multi-relational interactions across distinct modalities. Consequently, a biased understanding of the intricate interplay among modalities may be fostered, limiting prediction accuracy and effectiveness.

Conventional fine-tuning encounters increasing difficulties given the size of current Pre-trained Language Models, which makes parameter-efficient tuning become the focal point of frontier research. Recent advances in this field is the unified tuning methods that aim to tune the representations of both multi-head attention (MHA) and fully connected feed-forward network (FFN) simultaneously, but they rely on existing tuning methods and do not explicitly model domain knowledge for downstream tasks.

Audio and visual signals complement each other in human speech perception, and the same applies to automatic speech recognition. The visual signal is less evident than the acoustic signal, but more robust in a complex acoustic environment, as far as speech perception is concerned.

Human speech can be characterized by different components, including semantic content, speaker identity and prosodic information. Significant progress has been made in disentangling representations for semantic content and speaker identity in speech recognition and speaker verification tasks respectively. However, it is still an open challenging question to extract prosodic information because of the intrinsic association of different attributes, such as timbre and rhythm, and because of the need for supervised training schemes to achieve robust speech recognition.

Question answering requiring numerical reasoning, which generally involves symbolic operations such as sorting, counting, and addition, is a challenging task. To address such a problem, existing mixture-of-experts (MoE)-based methods design several specific answer predictors to handle different types of questions and achieve promising performance. However, they ignore the modeling and exploitation of fine-grained reasoning-related operations to support numerical reasoning, encountering the inadequacy in reasoning capability and interpretability.