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A quick guide to Amazon’s 40-plus papers at ICASSP

Topics such as code generation, commonsense reasoning, and self-learning complement the usual focus on speech recognition and acoustic-event classification.

By Staff writer
June 2, 2023
6 min read
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As usual at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), a plurality of Amazon’s accepted papers concentrate on automatic speech recognition — with, this year, a particular emphasis on personalized speech recognition. The topics of acoustic-event detection, keyword spotting, and signal processing are also well represented.

But as is also usual, some of the Amazon papers wander farther afield, to topics like commonsense reasoning, self-learning, query rewriting, and general machine learning techniques. Below is a quick guide to Amazon’s more than 40 papers at the conference.

Acoustic-event classification

FedRPO: Federated relaxed Pareto optimization for acoustic event classification
Meng Feng, Chieh-Chi Kao, Qingming Tang, Amit Solomon, Viktor Rozgic, Chao Wang

Multiscale audio spectrogram transformer for efficient audio classification
Wentao Zhu, Mohamed Omar

Transformer-based bioacoustic sound event detection on few-shot learning tasks
Liwen You, Erika Pelaez Coyotl, Suren Gunturu, Maarten Van Segbroeck

Weight-sharing supernet for searching specialized acoustic event classification networks across device constraints
Guan-Ting Lin, Qingming Tang, Chieh-Chi Kao, Viktor Rozgic, Chao Wang

Automatic speech recognition

Cross-utterance ASR rescoring with graph-based label propagation
Srinath Tankasala, Long Chen, Andreas Stolcke, Anirudh Raju, Shally Deng, Chander Chandak, Aparna Khare, Roland Maas, Venkatesh Ravichandran

Dynamic chunk convolution for unified streaming and non-streaming Conformer ASR
Xilai Li, Goeric Huybrechts, Srikanth Ronanki, Jeff Farris, Sravan Bodapati

Domain adaptation with external off-policy acoustic catalogs for scalable contextual end-to-end automated speech recognition
David M. Chan, Shalini Ghosh, Ariya Rastrow, Björn Hoffmeister

Gated contextual adapters for selective contextual biasing in neural transducers
Anastasios Alexandridis, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Grant Strimel, Feng-Ju (Claire) Chang, Ariya Rastrow, Nathan Susanj, Athanasios Mouchtaris

Mask the bias: Improving domain-adaptive generalization of CTC-based ASR with internal language model estimation
Nilaksh Das, Monica Sunkara, Sravan Bodapati, Jason Cai, Devang Kulshreshtha, Jeff Farris, Katrin Kirchhoff

On-the-fly text retrieval for end-to-end ASR adaptation
Bolaji Yusuf, Aditya Gourav, Ankur Gandhe, Ivan Bulyko

Robust acoustic and semantic contextual biasing in neural transducers for speech recognition
Xuandi Fu, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Ankur Gandhe, Jing Liu, Grant Strimel, Ross McGowan, Athanasios Mouchtaris

Code generation

Conversational text-to-SQL: An odyssey into state-of-the-art and challenges ahead
Sree Hari Krishnan Parthasarathi, Lu Zeng, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Conversational text-to-SQL.png
A proposed text-to-SQL system has three parts: (a) multitasking on coherent tasks with discrete prompts; (b) constrained decoding; and (c) N-best list reranking with a query plan model and a schema linking algorithm. From "Conversational text-to-SQL: An odyssey into state-of-the-art and challenges ahead".

Commonsense reasoning

CLICKER: Attention-based cross-lingual commonsense knowledge transfer
Ruolin Su, Zhongkai Sun, Sixing Lu, Chengyuan Ma, Chenlei Guo

Continual learning

Quantifying catastrophic forgetting in continual federated learning
Christophe Dupuy, Jimit Majmudar, Jixuan Wang, Tanya Roosta, Rahul Gupta, Clement Chung, Jie Ding, Salman Avestimehr

Endpoint detection

Adaptive endpointing with deep contextual multi-armed bandits
Do June Min, Andreas Stolcke, Anirudh Raju, Colin Vaz, Di He, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Viet Anh Trinh

Towards accurate and real-time end-of-speech estimation
Yifeng Fan, Colin Vaz, Di He, Jahn Heymann, Viet Anh Trinh, Zhe Zhang, Venkatesh Ravichandran

Keyword spotting

Dual-attention neural transducers for efficient wake word spotting in speech recognition
Saumya Sahai, Jing Liu, Thejaswi Muniyappa, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Anastasios Alexandridis, Grant Strimel, Ross McGowan, Ariya Rastrow, Feng-Ju Chang, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Siegfried Kunzmann

Dual-attention transducers.png
From "Dual-attention neural transducers for efficient wake word spotting in speech recognition".

Fixed-point quantization aware training for on-device keyword-spotting
Sashank Macha, Om Oza, Alex Escott, Francesco Caliva, Robbie Armitano, Santosh Kumar Cheekatmalla, Sree Hari Krishnan Parthasarathi, Yuzong Liu

Self-supervised speech representation learning for keyword-spotting with light-weight transformers
Chenyang Gao, Yue Gu, Francesco Caliva, Yuzong Liu

Small-footprint slimmable networks for keyword spotting
Zuhaib Akhtar, Mohammad Omar Khursheed, Dongsu Du, Yuzong Liu

Language learning

Phonetic RNN-transducer for mispronunciation diagnosis
Daniel Zhang, Soumya Saha, Sarah Campbell

Machine learning

Prune then distill: Dataset distillation with importance sampling
Anirudh Sundar, Gokce Keskin, Chander Chandak, I-Fan Chen, Pegah Ghahremani, Shalini Ghosh

Role of bias terms in dot-product attention
Mahdi Namazifar, Devamanyu Hazarika, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Natural-language understanding

Distill-quantize-tune: Leveraging large teachers for low-footprint efficient multilingual NLU on edge
Pegah Kharazmi, Zhewei Zhao, Clement Chung, Samridhi Choudhary

Pyramid dynamic inference: Encouraging faster inference via early exit boosting
Ershad Banijamali, Pegah Kharazmi, Sepehr Eghbali, Jixuan Wang, Clement Chung, Samridhi Choudhary

Personalized speech recognition

Dialog-act-guided adaptor.png
From "Dialog act guided contextual adapter for personalized speech recognition".

Dialog act guided contextual adapter for personalized speech recognition
Feng-Ju (Claire) Chang, Thejaswi Muniyappa, Kanthashree Mysore Sathyendra, Kai Wei, Grant Strimel, Ross McGowan

PROCTER: Pronunciation-aware contextual adapter for personalized speech recognition in neural transducers
Rahul Pandey, Roger Ren, Qi Luo, Jing Liu, Ariya Rastrow, Ankur Gandhe, Denis Filimonov, Grant Strimel, Andreas Stolcke, Ivan Bulyko

Slot-triggered contextual biasing for personalized speech recognition using neural transducers
Sibo Tong, Philip Harding, Simon Wiesler

Query rewriting

KG-ECO: Knowledge graph enhanced entity correction for query rewriting
Jason Cai, Mingda Li, Ziyan Jiang, Eunah Cho, Zheng Chen, Yang Liu, Xing Fan, Chenlei Guo

KG-ECO.png
From "KG-ECO: Knowledge graph enhanced entity correction for query rewriting".

Self-learning

Federated self-learning with weak supervision for speech recognition
Milind Rao, Gopinath Chennupati, Gautam Tiwari, Anit Kumar Sahu, Anirudh Raju, Ariya Rastrow, Jasha Droppo

Self-healing through error detection, attribution, and retraining
Ansel MacLaughlin, Anna Rumshisky, Rinat Khaziev, Anil Ramakrishna, Yuval Merhav, Rahul Gupta

Signal processing

A framework for unified real-time personalized and non-personalized speech enhancement
Zhepei Wang, Ritwik Giri, Devansh Shah, Jean-Marc Valin, Michael M. Goodwin, Paris Smaragdis

Augmentation robust self-supervised learning for human activity recognition
Cong Xu, Yuhang Li, Dae Lee, Andrew Park, Hongda Mao, Huyen Do, Jonathan Chung, Dinesh Nair

Retraction.png
The concept of retraction, mapping a point in the tangent space back to the manifold. From "Generative modeling based manifold learning for adaptive filtering guidance".

Generative modeling based manifold learning for adaptive filtering guidance
Karim Helwani, Paris Smaragdis, Michael M. Goodwin

SPADE: Self-supervised pretraining for acoustic disentanglement
John Harvill, Jarred Barber, Arun Nair, Ramin Pishehvar

Spoken-language understanding

End-to-end spoken language understanding using joint CTC loss and self-supervised, pretrained acoustic encoders
Jixuan Wang, Martin Radfar, Kai Wei, Clement Chung

Exploring subgroup performance in end-to-end speech models
Alkis Koudounas, Eliana Pastor, Giuseppe Attanasio, Vittorio Mazzia, Manuel Giollo, Thomas Gueudre, Luca Cagliero, Luca de Alfaro, Elena Baralis, Daniele Amberti

Multilingual end-to-end spoken language understanding for ultra-low footprint applications
Markus Mueller, Anastasios Alexandridis, Zach Trozenski, Joel Whiteman, Grant Strimel, Nathan Susanj, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Siegfried Kunzmann

Text-to-speech

Framewise WaveGAN: High speed adversarial vocoder in time domain with very low computational complexity
Ahmed Mustafa, Jean-Marc Valin, Jan Buethe, Paris Smaragdis, Mike Goodwin

Modelling low-resource accents without accent-specific TTS frontend
Georgi Tinchev, Marta Czarnowska, Kamil Deja, Kayoko Yanagisawa, Marius Cotescu

Video

ModEFormer: Modality-preserving embedding for audio-video synchronization using transformers
Akash Gupta, Rohun Tripathi, Wondong Jang

Multi-scale compositional constraints for representation learning on videos
Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Chandrashekhar Lavania, Lovish Chum, Shiva Sundaram

Voice communication

Low-bitrate redundancy coding of speech using a rate-distortion-optimized variational autoencoder
Jean-Marc Valin, Jan Buethe, Ahmed Mustafa

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Senior Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product identity and relationships at unprecedented scale. Using Generative AI, Visual Language Models (VLMs), and multimodal reasoning, we determine what makes each product unique and how products relate to one another across Amazon's catalog. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity—from electronics to groceries to digital content. The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Establishing product identities and groupings requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data—while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily. Amazon's Item and Relationship Platform group is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to build new state-of-the-art algorithms, models, and services to infer product-to-product relationships that matter to our customers. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic shopping experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog, tackle problems at the frontier of AI research, rapidly implement and deploy your algorithmic ideas at scale, across millions of customers. Key job responsibilities Key job responsibilities include: * Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval—translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks * Design and implement leading models leveraging VLMs, foundation models, and agentic architectures to solve product identity, relationship inference, and catalog understanding at billion-product scale * Pioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisions * Own end-to-end ML pipelines from research ideation to production deployment—processing petabytes of multimodal data with rigorous evaluation frameworks * Define research roadmaps aligned with business priorities, balancing foundational research with incremental product improvements * Mentor peer scientists and engineers on advanced ML techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor—building organizational capability in GenAI and multimodal AI * Represent the team in the broader science community—publishing findings, delivering tech talks, and staying at the forefront of GenAI, VLM, and agentic system research
Member Technical Staff - Software Development, Frontier AI Robotics
US, CA, San Francisco
In this role, you will act as the primary specialist for physics engine internals and dynamics, developing high-fidelity, vectorized simulation environments for robotics locomotion, navigation, and interaction/manipulation. You will collaborate with hardware engineers to validate robot models and partner with research scientists to ensure numerical stability and physical accuracy for Sim2Real transfer. Your work focuses on tuning solvers, optimizing collision dynamics, and performing system identification to enable the training of robust robot control policies for complex, physical interactions. Key job responsibilities * Develop and maintain the shared simulation software framework, specifically owning the physics integration, robot state management, and control layers * Develop and optimize parallelized (vectorized) physics environments for high-throughput reinforcement learning (e.g., Isaac Lab, MuJoCo) * Tune physics engine parameters (solvers, friction, restitution) to support complex contact-rich scenarios required for dexterous manipulation and agile locomotion. * Implement and validate complex robot models (URDF/MJCF) involving precise actuator and sensor modeling * Collaborate with robot engineers and scientists to perform System Identification (SysID) to minimize the Sim2Real gap About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR), we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through frontier foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
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