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The search for dark matter and physics beyond the Standard Model has grown to encompass a highly interdisciplinary approach. In this review, we survey recent searches for light, weakly-coupled particles - axions and dark photons - over the past decade, focusing on new experimental results and the incorporation of technologies and techniques from fields as diverse as quantum science, microwave engineering, precision magnetometry, and condensed matter physics. We also review theoretical progress which has been useful in identifying new experimental directions, and identify the areas of most rapid experimental progress and the technological advances required to continue exploring the parameter space for axions and dark photons., Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures. Invited review for Annual Reviews Nuclear Particle Science 2025

Millicharged particles are generic in theories of dark sectors. A cosmic or local abundance of them may be produced by the early universe, stellar environments, or the decay or annihilation of dark matter/dark energy. Furthermore, if such particles are light, these production channels result in a background of millicharged radiation. We show that light-shining-through-wall experiments employing superconducting RF cavities can also be used as ``direct deflection" experiments to search for this relativistic background. The millicharged plasma is first subjected to an oscillating electromagnetic field of a driven cavity, which causes charge separation in the form of charge and current perturbations. In turn, these perturbations can propagate outwards and resonantly excite electromagnetic fields in a well-shielded cavity placed nearby, enabling detection. We estimate that future versions of the existing Dark SRF experiment can probe orders of magnitude of currently unexplored parameter space, including millicharges produced from the Sun, the cosmic neutrino background, or other mechanisms that generate a thermal abundance with energy density as small as $\sim 10^{-4}$ that of the cosmic microwave background., Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures

Code-switching-where multilingual speakers alternately switch between languages during conversations-still poses significant challenges to end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems due to phenomena of both acoustic and semantic confusion. This issue arises because ASR systems struggle to handle the rapid alternation of languages effectively, which often leads to significant performance degradation. Our main contributions are at least threefold: First, we incorporate language identification (LID) information into several intermediate layers of the encoder, aiming to enrich output embeddings with more detailed language information. Secondly, through the novel application of language boundary alignment loss, the subsequent ASR modules are enabled to more effectively utilize the knowledge of internal language posteriors. Third, we explore the feasibility of using language posteriors to facilitate deep interaction between shared encoder and language-specific encoders. Through comprehensive experiments on the SEAME corpus, we have verified that our proposed method outperforms the prior-art method, disentangle based mixture-of-experts (D-MoE), further enhancing the acuity of the encoder to languages., Comment: SLT 2024

Long document summarization poses a significant challenge in natural language processing due to input lengths that exceed the capacity of most state-of-the-art pre-trained language models. This study proposes a hierarchical framework that segments and condenses information from long documents, subsequently fine-tuning the processed text with an abstractive summarization model. Unsupervised topic segmentation methods identify semantically appropriate breakpoints. The condensation stage utilizes an unsupervised generation model to generate condensed data, and our current experiments employ ChatGPT(v3.5). The summarization stage fine-tunes the abstractive summarization model on the condensed data to generate the final results. This framework enables long documents to be processed on models even when the document length exceeds the model's maximum input size. The exclusion of the entire document from the summarization model reduces the time and computational resources required for training, making the framework suitable for contexts with constrained local computational resources.

While pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems demonstrate impressive performance on matched domains, their performance often degrades when confronted with channel mismatch stemming from unseen recording environments and conditions. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel channel-aware data simulation method for robust ASR training. Our method harnesses the synergistic power of channel-extractive techniques and generative adversarial networks (GANs). We first train a channel encoder capable of extracting embeddings from arbitrary audio. On top of this, channel embeddings are extracted using a minimal amount of target-domain data and used to guide a GAN-based speech synthesizer. This synthesizer generates speech that faithfully preserves the phonetic content of the input while mimicking the channel characteristics of the target domain. We evaluate our method on the challenging Hakka Across Taiwan (HAT) and Taiwanese Across Taiwan (TAT) corpora, achieving relative character error rate (CER) reductions of 20.02% and 9.64%, respectively, compared to the baselines. These results highlight the efficacy of our channel-aware data simulation method for bridging the gap between source- and target-domain acoustics., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2025

Second language (L2) learners can improve their pronunciation by imitating golden speech, especially when the speech that aligns with their respective speech characteristics. This study explores the hypothesis that learner-specific golden speech generated with zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) techniques can be harnessed as an effective metric for measuring the pronunciation proficiency of L2 learners. Building on this exploration, the contributions of this study are at least two-fold: 1) design and development of a systematic framework for assessing the ability of a synthesis model to generate golden speech, and 2) in-depth investigations of the effectiveness of using golden speech in automatic pronunciation assessment (APA). Comprehensive experiments conducted on the L2-ARCTIC and Speechocean762 benchmark datasets suggest that our proposed modeling can yield significant performance improvements with respect to various assessment metrics in relation to some prior arts. To our knowledge, this study is the first to explore the role of golden speech in both ZS-TTS and APA, offering a promising regime for computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT)., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables

Automated speaking assessment in conversation tests (ASAC) aims to evaluate the overall speaking proficiency of an L2 (second-language) speaker in a setting where an interlocutor interacts with one or more candidates. Although prior ASAC approaches have shown promising performance on their respective datasets, there is still a dearth of research specifically focused on incorporating the coherence of the logical flow within a conversation into the grading model. To address this critical challenge, we propose a hierarchical graph model that aptly incorporates both broad inter-response interactions (e.g., discourse relations) and nuanced semantic information (e.g., semantic words and speaker intents), which is subsequently fused with contextual information for the final prediction. Extensive experimental results on the NICT-JLE benchmark dataset suggest that our proposed modeling approach can yield considerable improvements in prediction accuracy with respect to various assessment metrics, as compared to some strong baselines. This also sheds light on the importance of investigating coherence-related facets of spoken responses in ASAC., Comment: Accepted by IEEE SLT 2024

End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have become standard practice for various commercial applications. However, in real-world scenarios, the long-tailed nature of word distribution often leads E2E ASR models to perform well on common words but fall short in recognizing uncommon ones. Recently, the notion of a contextual adapter (CA) was proposed to infuse external knowledge represented by a context word list into E2E ASR models. Although CA can improve recognition performance on rare words, two crucial data imbalance problems remain. First, when using low-frequency words as context words during training, since these words rarely occur in the utterance, CA becomes prone to overfit on attending to the token due to higher-frequency words not being present in the context list. Second, the long-tailed distribution within the context list itself still causes the model to perform poorly on low-frequency context words. In light of this, we explore in-depth the impact of altering the context list to have words with different frequency distributions on model performance, and meanwhile extend CA with a simple yet effective context-balanced learning objective. A series of experiments conducted on the AISHELL-1 benchmark dataset suggests that using all vocabulary words from the training corpus as the context list and pairing them with our balanced objective yields the best performance, demonstrating a significant reduction in character error rate (CER) by up to 1.21% and a more pronounced 9.44% reduction in the error rate of zero-shot words., Comment: Accepted by SLT 2024

Cross-domain speech enhancement (SE) is often faced with severe challenges due to the scarcity of noise and background information in an unseen target domain, leading to a mismatch between training and test conditions. This study puts forward a novel data simulation method to address this issue, leveraging noise-extractive techniques and generative adversarial networks (GANs) with only limited target noisy speech data. Notably, our method employs a noise encoder to extract noise embeddings from target-domain data. These embeddings aptly guide the generator to synthesize utterances acoustically fitted to the target domain while authentically preserving the phonetic content of the input clean speech. Furthermore, we introduce the notion of dynamic stochastic perturbation, which can inject controlled perturbations into the noise embeddings during inference, thereby enabling the model to generalize well to unseen noise conditions. Experiments on the VoiceBank-DEMAND benchmark dataset demonstrate that our domain-adaptive SE method outperforms an existing strong baseline based on data simulation., Comment: Accepted to IEEE SLT 2024

The Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) index is a widely accepted method in the building automation sector because it can precisely estimate indoor thermal comfort levels depending on a variety of environmental parameters. This study suggests an experimental setup for automated real-time optimization of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) operations in closed spaces utilizing PMV-based modelling and Multilayer perceptron (MLP) based prediction, with an experimental setup which includes ESP32 and BME280 sensor. The main objective of this paper is to employ the MLP algorithm and predicted mean vote model to dynamically predict comfort differences considering the fluctuations in environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity. The proposed method is implemented across various settings, encompassing both an anechoic chamber and laboratory environments. The findings indicate that the proposed approach effectively enhances the management of HVAC systems in confined areas, leading to higher energy efficiency and enhanced indoor thermal comfort. The effectiveness of the suggested solution is supported by experimental validation, which shows that significant energy savings are achieved while maintaining comfort levels for occupants within.

Millicharged dark matter particles can be efficiently captured by the Sun, where they annihilate into tau leptons, leading to the production of high-energy neutrinos. In contrast to the Earth, the high temperature of the Sun suppresses the fraction of millicharged particles that are bound to nuclei, allowing for potentially high annihilation rates. We recast existing constraints from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and use this information to place new limits on the fraction of the dark matter that is millicharged. This analysis excludes previously unexplored parameter space for masses of $m_\chi \sim (5-100) \ \text{GeV}$, charges of $q_\chi \sim 10^{-3}-10^{-2}$, and fractional abundances as small as $f_{_\text{DM}} \sim 10^{-5}$., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures

Automatic Speech Assessment (ASA) has seen notable advancements with the utilization of self-supervised features (SSL) in recent research. However, a key challenge in ASA lies in the imbalanced distribution of data, particularly evident in English test datasets. To address this challenge, we approach ASA as an ordinal classification task, introducing Weighted Vectors Ranking Similarity (W-RankSim) as a novel regularization technique. W-RankSim encourages closer proximity of weighted vectors in the output layer for similar classes, implying that feature vectors with similar labels would be gradually nudged closer to each other as they converge towards corresponding weighted vectors. Extensive experimental evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our approach in improving ordinal classification performance for ASA. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid model that combines SSL and handcrafted features, showcasing how the inclusion of handcrafted features enhances performance in an ASA system., Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2024

Automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) manages to evaluate the pronunciation proficiency of a second language (L2) learner in a target language. Existing efforts typically draw on regression models for proficiency score prediction, where the models are trained to estimate target values without explicitly accounting for phoneme-awareness in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a contrastive phonemic ordinal regularizer (ConPCO) tailored for regression-based APA models to generate more phoneme-discriminative features while considering the ordinal relationships among the regression targets. The proposed ConPCO first aligns the phoneme representations of an APA model and textual embeddings of phonetic transcriptions via contrastive learning. Afterward, the phoneme characteristics are retained by regulating the distances between inter- and intra-phoneme categories in the feature space while allowing for the ordinal relationships among the output targets. We further design and develop a hierarchical APA model to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Extensive experiments conducted on the speechocean762 benchmark dataset suggest the feasibility and efficacy of our approach in relation to some cutting-edge baselines., Comment: This paper has been withdrawn because the authors aim to achieve better organization in writing and more detailed experimental analysis

We demonstrate that long-ranged terrestrial electric fields can be used to exclude or discover ultralight bosonic particles with extremely small charge, beyond that probed by astrophysics. Bound condensates of scalar millicharged particles can be rapidly produced near electrostatic generators or in the atmosphere. If such particles directly couple to the photon, they quickly short out such electrical activity. Instead, for interactions mediated by a kinetically-mixed dark photon, the effects of this condensate are suppressed depending on the size of the kinetic mixing, but may still be directly detected with precision electromagnetic sensors. Analogous condensates can also develop in other theories involving new long-ranged forces, such as those coupled to baryon and lepton number., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

Automated speaking assessment (ASA) typically involves automatic speech recognition (ASR) and hand-crafted feature extraction from the ASR transcript of a learner's speech. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown stellar performance compared to traditional methods. However, SSL-based ASA systems are faced with at least three data-related challenges: limited annotated data, uneven distribution of learner proficiency levels and non-uniform score intervals between different CEFR proficiency levels. To address these challenges, we explore the use of two novel modeling strategies: metric-based classification and loss reweighting, leveraging distinct SSL-based embedding features. Extensive experimental results on the ICNALE benchmark dataset suggest that our approach can outperform existing strong baselines by a sizable margin, achieving a significant improvement of more than 10% in CEFR prediction accuracy., Comment: Accepted to NAACL 2024 Findings

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E ASR) systems often suffer from mistranscription of domain-specific phrases, such as named entities, sometimes leading to catastrophic failures in downstream tasks. A family of fast and lightweight named entity correction (NEC) models for ASR have recently been proposed, which normally build on phonetic-level edit distance algorithms and have shown impressive NEC performance. However, as the named entity (NE) list grows, the problems of phonetic confusion in the NE list are exacerbated; for example, homophone ambiguities increase substantially. In view of this, we proposed a novel Description Augmented Named entity CorrEctoR (dubbed DANCER), which leverages entity descriptions to provide additional information to facilitate mitigation of phonetic confusion for NEC on ASR transcription. To this end, an efficient entity description augmented masked language model (EDA-MLM) comprised of a dense retrieval model is introduced, enabling MLM to adapt swiftly to domain-specific entities for the NEC task. A series of experiments conducted on the AISHELL-1 and Homophone datasets confirm the effectiveness of our modeling approach. DANCER outperforms a strong baseline, the phonetic edit-distance-based NEC model (PED-NEC), by a character error rate (CER) reduction of about 7% relatively on AISHELL-1 for named entities. More notably, when tested on Homophone that contain named entities of high phonetic confusion, DANCER offers a more pronounced CER reduction of 46% relatively over PED-NEC for named entities., Comment: Accepted by LREC-COLING 2024

End-to-End Neural Diarization with Encoder-Decoder based Attractor (EEND-EDA) is an end-to-end neural model for automatic speaker segmentation and labeling. It achieves the capability to handle flexible number of speakers by estimating the number of attractors. EEND-EDA, however, struggles to accurately capture local speaker dynamics. This work proposes an auxiliary loss that aims to guide the Transformer encoders at the lower layer of EEND-EDA model to enhance the effect of self-attention modules using speaker activity information. The results evaluated on public dataset Mini LibriSpeech, demonstrates the effectiveness of the work, reducing Diarization Error Rate from 30.95% to 28.17%. We will release the source code on GitHub to allow further research and reproducibility., Comment: Accepted to The 28th International Conference on Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence (TAAI), in Chinese language

Speech separation has recently made significant progress thanks to the fine-grained vision used in time-domain methods. However, several studies have shown that adopting Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) for feature extraction could be beneficial when encountering harsher conditions, such as noise or reverberation. Therefore, we propose a magnitude-conditioned time-domain framework, ConSep, to inherit the beneficial characteristics. The experiment shows that ConSep promotes performance in anechoic, noisy, and reverberant settings compared to two celebrated methods, SepFormer and Bi-Sep. Furthermore, we visualize the components of ConSep to strengthen the advantages and cohere with the actualities we have found in preliminary studies.

This study introduces a reformed Sinc-convolution (Sincconv) framework tailored for the encoder component of deep networks for speech enhancement (SE). The reformed Sincconv, based on parametrized sinc functions as band-pass filters, offers notable advantages in terms of training efficiency, filter diversity, and interpretability. The reformed Sinc-conv is evaluated in conjunction with various SE models, showcasing its ability to boost SE performance. Furthermore, the reformed Sincconv provides valuable insights into the specific frequency components that are prioritized in an SE scenario. This opens up a new direction of SE research and improving our knowledge of their operating dynamics.