Abeer Alwan
Distinguished Professor
Leads the Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory on noise-robust speech recognition and models of speech production and perception.
Abeer Alwan's lab at UCLA works on speech recognition & spoken language, music, audio & sound and robot perception & SLAM. 43 papers since 2023, 13 at top venues, mostly Interspeech and ICASSP. 5 PhD students and 1 master's student. 71 alumni, most often to Amazon and Apple. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 11/ year
- at T1 venues
- 30%
- PhD students
- 5
- MS students
- 1
- alumni listed
- 71
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 11 papers2026 · T1 3 · collecting
- 11 papers2025 · T1 3
- 13 papers2024 · T1 2
- 8 papers2023 · T1 5
T1 venuesOtherVenues: Interspeech, ICASSP, Speech Communication, TASLP
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Speech recognition & spoken language30 papers
- speech22 papers
- Music, audio & sound2 papers
- Robot perception & SLAM2 papers
- production1 paper
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
202611 papers
- Journal of Educational Measurement, 63(1), . https://doi.org/10.1111/jedm.12435Addressing Bias in Spoken Language Systems Used in the Development and Implementation of Automated Child Language-Based Assessment (opens in a new tab)
- accepted for publication at the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT).AURA: Uncertainty-Routed Activation Editing for Acoustic Grounding in Speech Foundation Models (opens in a new tab)
- Computer Speech and Language, , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl. .102012Compositional domain adaptation for automatic speech recognition with headwise selective attention merging (opens in a new tab)
- ICASSP - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, SpainCross-Attentive Adapter with Regularized Domain Adaptation for Speaker Verification (opens in a new tab)
- accepted for publication at the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT).Encoder Awakening via Adapters: Effective Domain-Adaptive Fine-tuning of Speech-LLMs (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)Entropy-Aware Domain-Routed Mixture-of-Experts Speech-LLM Framework: A Case Study of Multi-Domain Child-Adult ASR (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)GC-LoRA: Gated Convolutional LoRA for Parameter-Efficient Acoustic Adaptation (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domains (opens in a new tab)
- JASA Express Letters, 6(3), 034802. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0042974Improving Zero-Shot Style Transfer Text-to-Speech by Disentangled Fine-Grained Style Modeling (opens in a new tab)
- ICASSP - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, SpainMind the Shift: Using Delta SSL Embeddings to Enhance Child ASR (opens in a new tab)
- ICASSP - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, SpainSTACodec: Semantic Token Assignment for Balancing Acoustic Fidelity and Semantic Information in Audio Codecs (opens in a new tab)
202511 papers
- Proc. Workshop on Child Computer Interaction - WOCCI , 41-45, doi: 10.21437/WOCCI. -9An Age-Agnostic System for Robust Speaker Verification (opens in a new tab)
- Proc. Workshop on Child Computer Interaction - WOCCI , 6-10, doi: 10.21437/WOCCI. -2Benchmarking Training Paradigms, Dataset Composition, and Model Scaling for Child ASR in ESPnet (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)CHSER: A Dataset and Case Study on Generative Speech Error Correction for Child ASR (opens in a new tab)
- AI for Children's Speech and Language Workshop (AI4CSL), ASRUComparing Unsupervised and Supervised Semantic Speech Tokens: A Case Study of Child ASR (opens in a new tab)
- ICASSP - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal ProcessingEnhancing Age-Related Robustness in Children Speaker Verification (opens in a new tab)
- Proc. Workshop on Child Computer Interaction - WOCCI , 1-5, doi: 10.21437/WOCCI. -1G-IFT: A Gated Linear Unit adapter with Iterative Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Children’s Speaker Verification (opens in a new tab)
- The Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaIntroduction to special issue on acoustic cue-based perception and production of speech by humans and machines (opens in a new tab)
- Proc. Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE), 1-5, doi: 10.21437/SLaTE. -1Leveraging ASR and LLMs for Automated Scoring and Feedback in Children’s Spoken Language Assessments (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)ProMode: A Speech Prosody Model Conditioned on Acoustic and Textual Inputs (opens in a new tab)
- ICASSP - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal ProcessingSelective Attention Merging for low resource tasks: A case study of Child ASR (opens in a new tab)
- Speech Communication (T1)The Ohio Child Speech Corpus (opens in a new tab)
202413 papers
- Machine Learning for Cognitive and Mental Health Workshop (ML4CMH), AAAI , Vancouver, BC, Canada"A Privacy-Preserving Unsupervised Speaker Disentanglement Method for Depression Detection from Speech (opens in a new tab)
- Computer Speech & Language"Enhancing Accuracy and Privacy in Speech-Based Depression Detection through Speaker Disentanglemen (opens in a new tab)
- IEEE Signal Processing Letters"UniEnc-CASSNAT: An Encoder Only Non-autoregressive ASR with Self-supervised Pretrained Speech Models (opens in a new tab)
- Journal of Black Excellence in Engineering Science, and TechnologyAn Analysis of Large Language Models for African American English Speaking Children's Oral Language Assessment (opens in a new tab)
- Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaAn Exploratory Study on Dialect Density Estimation for Children and Adult's African American English (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)Benchmarking Children's ASR with Supervised and Self-supervised Speech Foundation Models (opens in a new tab)
- ICASSP (T1)CORAAL QA: A Dataset and Framework for Open Domain Spontaneous Speech Question Answering from Long Audio Files (opens in a new tab)
- Communications BiologyGenetic association analysis of human median voice pitch identifies a common locus for tonal and non-tonal languages (opens in a new tab)
- NAACL WorkshopLarge Language Model-based Pipeline for Item Difficulty and Response Time Estimation for Educational Assessments (opens in a new tab)
- IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW), Seoul, Korea, Republic ofSOA: Reducing Domain Mismatch in SSL Pipeline by Speech Only Adaptation for Low Resource ASR (opens in a new tab)
- Speech Communication : 103106, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom. .103106Speechformer-CTC: Sequential modeling of depression detection with speech temporal classification (opens in a new tab)
- JASA Express Lett. 1 November ; 4 (11): 115201, https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0034195The JIBO Kids Corpus: A speech dataset of child-robot interactions in a classroom environment (opens in a new tab)
20238 papers
- TASLP (T1)"A CTC Alignment-based Non-autoregressive Transformer for End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)"An Equitable Framework for Automatically Assessing Children's Oral Narrative Language Abilities (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)"Developmental Articulatory and Acoustic Features for Six to Ten Year Old Children (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)"FusedF0: Improving DNN-based F0 Estimation by Fusion of Summary-Correlograms and Raw Waveform Representations of Speech Signals (opens in a new tab)
- in ICASSP - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Rhodes Island, Greece"Leveraging Multiple Sources in Automatic African American English Dialect Detection for Adults and Children (opens in a new tab)
- Interspeech (T1)"Non-uniform Speaker Disentanglement For Depression Detection From Raw Speech Signals (opens in a new tab)
- Proc. Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE), 119-120."Towards Automatically Assessing Children's Oral Picture Description Tasks (opens in a new tab)
- in Black in AI Workshop at NeurIPs"Towards Effective Speech-based AI in the Classroom: The Case of AAE-Speaking Children (opens in a new tab)
Where alumni went71 listed, 40% to industry
Industry 4Academia 6
Most often to
- Amazon
- Apple
- Microsoft
Also to
- ETH Zurich
- Johns Hopkins University
- NYU
Apply to UCLAFall 2027
Computer Science PhD
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