Wen-Chin Huang 黃文勁

Assistant Professor, Toda Laboratory.
Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University.

2022-kyoto.png
Photo taken at Kiyomizu-dera, Kyoto, Japan, Dec. 2022.

Education. I was born in Taiwan and now based in Nagoya, Japan. I received M.S. and Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University in 2021 and 2024, respectively. I received B.S. in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2018.

Work experience. I worked as a student researcher at Google Japan from April 2023 to March 2024, under the supervision of Yuma Koizumi. From May to September 2022, I was an research intern at FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), Meta, working on speech-to-speech translation, under the supervision of Peng-Jen Chen. From August 2021 to February 2022, I was an research intern at Reality Labs Research (RL-R), Meta, working on binaural speech synthesis, under the supervision of Dejan Markovic. From August 2019 to September 2019, I interned at the NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation under the supervision of Prof. Hirokazu Kameoka. I work closely with the Institute of Information Science in Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan with advisors Prof. Hsin-Min Wang and Prof. Yu Tsao, where I was a research assistant from July 2017 to March 2019.

Honors and activities. I received the Research Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC1) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), which last from April 2021 to March 2024. I am a co-organizer of the VoiceMOS Challenge series, Voice Conversion Challenge 2020, and Singing Voice Conversion Challenge 2023. I was honored the Outstanding Graduate Student Award (学術奨励賞) of Nagoya University in 2023. I was honored the 16th IEEE Signal Processing Society Japan Student Best Paper Award, the Best Paper Award at the 13th Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA ASC), 2021 and Best Student Paper Award at the 11th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), 2018. I am also a reviewer of several journals including IEEE SPL, IEEE/ACM TASLP, Speech Communication, etc.

My research interest focuses on speech processing, with a main focus on voice conversion, speech synthesis, and speech quality assessment. I also work on related applications including speaking-aid and accent conversion.

When I am not doing research, I spend most of the time street dancing. I have been dancing for 10 years. Check out this video, this video, this video, this video, and this video. Recently I also started golfing. My best score is 96 (regular tee).

My CV can be downloaded here.

news

Aug 14, 2024 I gave an invited talk on voice conversion at CITI, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Please find the slides here.
Jul 16, 2024 I gave a lecture on voice conversion. Please find the slides here.
Jul 01, 2024 We wrote a review paper on evaluation of synthesis speech, which was published at Acoustical Science and Technology, a journal in Japan. The English version can be found here.
Jun 14, 2024 The VoiceMOS Challenge 2024 is officially over! Now you can freely get the datasets by registering through the CodaBench page. There will also be a special session at SLT 2024!
May 17, 2024 One paper was accepted to IEEE/ACM TASLP. [Pretraining and Adaptation Techniques for Electrolaryngeal Speech Recognition]
Apr 16, 2024 One paper was accepted to IEEE/ACM TASLP. [A Large-Scale Evaluation of Speech Foundation Models]
Apr 14, 2024 One paper was presented at ICASSP 2024. [Electrolaryngeal Speech Intelligibility Enhancement through Robust Linguistic Encoders]
Apr 01, 2024 I am now an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University.
Feb 16, 2024 I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis!
Dec 15, 2023 Four papers were presented at ASRU 2023. [SVCC2023] [VoiceMOS Challenge 2023] [NU-SVCC2023] [N2D-VC-GST]
Aug 25, 2023 A paper was accepted to APSIPA ASC 2023. [Evaluate-FAC]
Jun 26, 2023 The Singing Voice Conversion Challenge 2023 is over! We have a summary paper submitted to arXiv. There will also be a special session at ASRU 2023!
Jun 05, 2023 I was honored the Outstanding Graduate Student Award (学術奨励賞) of Nagoya University!
Apr 10, 2023 I start serving as a student researcher at Google Japan.
Apr 07, 2023 I open-sourced the seq2seq-vc toolkit! It is a toolkit for sequence-to-sequence voice conversion research. Please check it out!
Mar 15, 2023 I open-sourced the s3prl-vc toolkit! It also comes with a HuggingFace Spaces demo. Please check them out!
Jan 19, 2023 The first Singing Voice Conversion Challenge kicks off today! This is a new version of the voice conversion challenge (VCC) series that aims to compare techniques for singing voice conversion, in contrast to normal voice conversion. We are still accepting new challengers! If you are interested in participating, please fill in the registration form.
Dec 27, 2022 The VTN journal paper received the 16th IEEE Signal Processing Society Japan Student Best Paper Award. Open access.
Jul 25, 2022 One journal was accepted to the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. ArXiv version.
Jun 14, 2022 One paper [Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation] was accepted to ICASSP 2023. Also, one paper I co-authored [Intermediate fine-tuning for pathological ASR] was also accepted.
Jun 14, 2022 Two papers [End-to-end binaural synthesis] [VoiceMOS Challenge 2022] were accepted to Interspeech 2022. Also, one paper I co-authored [SSL for pathological ASR] was also accepted.
May 16, 2022 I started my internship at FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), Meta.
Mar 23, 2022 I was invited to give a talk at 音声言語情報処理研究会/音声研究会 (SLP/SP), a Japanese domestic conference. Slides are [here].
Mar 23, 2022 The VoiceMOS Challenge 2022 is over! We have a [summary paper] submitted to arXiv. The CodaLab competition page is still opened, and ANYONE can register to get the dataset and give it a try!
Jan 22, 2022 Two first-author papers [S3PRL-VC] [LDNet] and one co-first author paper [N2D VC] were accepted to ICASSP 2022. Also, two papers I co-authored [mos-finetune-ssl] [Direct N2N VC] were also accepted.
Jan 13, 2022 The VoiceMOS Challenge was accepted as a special session at INTERSPEECH 2022! Again, we are still accepting new challengers. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at voicemos2022@nii.ac.jp first then register at the CodaLab page.
Dec 20, 2021 The first VoiceMOS Challenge kicks off today! This is a new challenge that aims to compare techniques for predicting the mean opinion score (MOS) of synthetic speech. We are still accepting new challengers! If you are interested in participating, please contact us at voicemos2022@nii.ac.jp.
Dec 17, 2021 Received the Best Paper Award at APSIPA ASC 2021!
Sep 11, 2021 One first-author paper [Prosody for ASR+TTS VC] was accepted to ASRU 2021. Also, one paper I co-authored [ELVC w/ Seq2seq] was accepted.
Aug 31, 2021 Three co-author papers were accepted to APSIPA ASC 2021. [ELVC w/ lip] [Noisy-to-noisy VC] [Investigation of non-parallel seq2seq VC w/ synthetic data]
Aug 31, 2021 I started my internship at Facebook Reality Labs Research.
Jul 27, 2021 You can read some posts I wrote in the blog page, as long as you understand Mandarin Chinese.
Jun 04, 2021 One first-author paper [Dysarthric VC w/ VTN+VAE] was accepted to Interspeech 2021. Also, one paper I co-authored [Relational data selection] was accepted.
Feb 22, 2021 I successfully defensed my master’s thesis. Also, I successfully passed the Ph.D. entrance exam, and will become a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University.
Jan 30, 2021 One paper [EMA2S] was accepted to IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2021.
Jan 30, 2021 Two first-author papers [VQVAE-VC] [BERT-ASR] were accepted to ICASSP 2021. Also, two papers I co-authored [crank] [NonAR seq2seq VC] were also accepted.
Jan 07, 2021 One journal was accepted to the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. The early access version is available now on IEEE Xplore. There is also an arXiv version.
Oct 17, 2020 Four papers are accepted to the Joint Workshop for the Blizzard Challenge and Voice Conversion Challenge 2020! [Challenge Summary] [Objective Assesement] [Baseline ASR+TTS] [NU entry]
Oct 17, 2020 The proceeding of the Joint Workshop for the Blizzard Challenge and Voice Conversion Challenge 2020 is online now!
Jul 29, 2020 The implementation of VTN is open-sourced on ESPnet.
Jul 28, 2020 One paper [VTN] was accepted to Interspeech 2020.
May 20, 2020 One journal paper [ASVspoof 2019 database] was accepted to the Computer Speech & Language.
Mar 09, 2020 I am co-organizing the Voice Conversion Challenge 2020. I developed a seq-to-seq baseline w/ ESPnet.
Jan 19, 2020 One journal paper [CDVAE-CLS-GAN] was accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence.

latest posts

Jul 01, 2024 名古屋大學留學四&五年目、名古屋大學助教零年目（上）
Apr 24, 2022 名古屋大學留學三年目
Jul 24, 2021 名古屋大學留學二年目
Apr 22, 2020 名古屋大學留學一年目
Sep 15, 2019 NTT CS LAB實習Last Day

selected publications

  1. VTN
    Voice Transformer Network: Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion Using Transformer with Text-to-Speech Pretraining
    Wen-Chin Huang, Tomoki Hayashi, Yi-Chiao Wu, Hirokazu Kameoka, and Tomoki Toda
    In Proc. Interspeech, Aug 2020
    arXiv Code Demo
  2. S3PRL-VC
    S3PRL-VC: Open-source Voice Conversion Framework with Self-supervised Speech Representations
    Wen-Chin Huang, Shu-Wen Yang, Tomoki Hayashi, Hung-Yi Lee, Shinji Watanabe, and Tomoki Toda
    In Proc. ICASSP, Aug 2022
    arXiv Code Demo
  3. VMC’22
    The Voicemos Challenge 2022
    Wen-Chin Huang, E. Cooper, Y. Tsao, H.-M. Wang, J. Yamagishi, and T. Toda
    In Proc. Interspeech, Aug 2022
    arXiv Website
  4. A review on subjective and objective evaluation of synthetic speech
    E. Cooper, Wen-Chin Huang, Y. Tsao, H.-M. Wang, T. Toda, and J. Yamagishi
    Acoustical Science and Technology, Aug 2024
    Website