Papers by Katrin Kirchhoff
Align-Refine: Non-Autoregressive Speech Recognition via Iterative Realignment (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive encoder-decoder models improve decoding speed, but generation quality suffers . editing at the level of output sequences limits model flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose *iterative realignment* which iteratively realigns connectionist temporal alignments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches an autoregressive baseline with a 14x speedup on the WSJ dataset; on LibriSpeech, it achieves an LM-free test-other WER of 9.0% (19% relative improvement on comparable work). |
Rethinking the Role of Scale for In-Context Learning: An Interpretability-based Case Study at 66 Billion Scale (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | 70% of attention heads and 20% of the feed forward networks can be removed with minimal decline in task performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to investigate whether in-context learning is not uniform across all components of a large language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can remove 70% of attention heads and 20% of feed forward networks with minimal decline in task performance. |
DeAL: Decoding-time Alignment for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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James Y. Huang, Sailik Sengupta, Daniele Bonadiman, Yi-An Lai, Arshit Gupta, Nikolaos Pappas, Saab Mansour, Katrin Kirchhoff, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to generate content aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows the user to customize reward functions and enables Decoding-time Alignment of LLMs (DeAL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows the user to customize reward functions and enables Decoding-time Alignment of LLMs. |
Self-supervised Representation Learning for Speech Processing (2022.naacl-tutorials)
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Hung-yi Lee, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Shinji Watanabe, Tara Sainath, Karen Livescu, Shang-Wen Li, Shu-wen Yang, Katrin Kirchhoff
| Challenge: | Self-supervised representation learning (SSL) uses proxy supervised learning tasks to obtain training data from unlabeled corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose to survey the latest SSL techniques, tools, datasets, and performance achievement in speech processing to scale up current machine learning technologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tutorial is highly relevant to the special theme of ACL about language diversity. |
CLARITY: A Framework and Benchmark for Conversational Language Ambiguity and Unanswerability in Interactive NL2SQL Systems (2026.acl-industry)
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Tabinda Sarwar, Farhad Moghimifar, Cong Duy Vu Hoang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Shawn Chang Xu, Fahimeh Saleh, Poorya Zaremoodi, Avirup Sil, Katrin Kirchhoff
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assume a single source of ambiguity and rely on user interaction for resolution, overlooking realistic failure modes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatically generating an NL2SQL benchmark with multi-faceted ambiguities and diverse user behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms executable SQL into ambiguous queries with a conversational continuation and schema-level metadata. |
SpeechGuard: Exploring the Adversarial Robustness of Multi-modal Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Raghuveer Peri, Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Srikanth Ronanki, Anshu Bhatia, Karel Mundnich, Saket Dingliwal, Nilaksh Das, Zejiang Hou, Goeric Huybrechts, Srikanth Vishnubhotla, Daniel Garcia-Romero, Sundararajan Srinivasan, Kyu Han, Katrin Kirchhoff
| Challenge: | Integrated Speech and Large Language Models (SLMs) that follow speech instructions and generate relevant text responses have gained popularity lately. |
| Approach: | They propose algorithms that can generate adversarial examples to jailbreak SLMs without human involvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms achieve state-of-the-art on spoken question-answering task scoring over 80% on both safety and helpfulness metrics. |
Masked Language Model Scoring (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained masked language models require finetuning for most tasks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate pretrained masked language models out of the box via their pseudo-log-likelihood scores (PLLs) they attribute this success to PLL’s unsupervised expression of linguistic acceptability without a left-to-right bias, greatly improving on scores from GPT-2 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms autoregressive language models in a variety of tasks. |