William Chen

William Chen

Graduate Student at CMU LTI

About me

I am a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, advised by Professor Shinji Watanabe, as a part of the Audio and Voice Lab. I am also a Visiting Researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs (FAIR), working on multimodal language models.

I am interested in methods that can 1.) make AI models better generalize (across modalities, languages, etc) and 2.) rely less on human supervision or modelling assumptions. This includes research topics like scaling, self-supervised learning, multilingualism, and long-form processing.

I received my Master’s in Language Technologies from CMU LTI in May 2024, and my BS in Computer Science and BA in History from the University of Central Florida in May 2021.

Awards

Selected Publications

Google Scholar will be more up-to-date.

CrossEdit: Cross-Modal Training Enables Rich Audio-Visual Editing
William Chen, Prem Seetharaman, Ke Chen, Oriol Nieto, Kevin Duarte, Siddharth Srinivasan Iyer, Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Zhiwen Cao, Shinji Watanabe, Yuanjun Xiong, Jianming Zhang, Zeyu Jin, Justin Salamon
paper

YODAS v3: Over 1 Million Hours of High-Bandwidth, Stereophonic, Multilingual Speech
William Chen, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Sayaka Shiota, Satoru Fukayama, Samuele Cornell, Shinji Watanabe
Interspeech 2026
paper

AudioChat: Unified Audio Storytelling, Editing, and Understanding with Transfusion Forcing
William Chen, Prem Seetharaman, Rithesh Kumar, Oriol Nieto, Shinji Watanabe, Justin Salamon, Zeyu Jin
ICML 2026
paper

OWLS: Scaling Laws for Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation Models
William Chen, Jinchuan Tian, Yifan Peng, Brian Yan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe
ICML 2025
paper

Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages
William Chen, Wangyou Zhang, Yifan Peng, Xinjian Li, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Soumi Maiti, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe
EMNLP 2024, Best Paper Award
paper

Improving Massively Multilingual ASR With Auxiliary CTC Objectives
William Chen, Brian Yan, Jiatong Shi, Yifan Peng, Soumi Maiti, Shinji Watanabe
ICASSP 2023, Top 3% Paper Award, SPS Student Travel Grand Award
paper

Past Positions

From May 2026 to August 2026, I was a research intern at Meta Superintelligence Labs in FAIR, working on multilingual speech language models. I worked with Gil Keren and Matt Setzler.

From May 2025 to May 2026, I was a research intern at Adobe Research working on diffusion models and audio generation. I worked with Prem Seetharaman, Rithesh Kumar, Oriol Nieto, Ke Chen, Justin Salamon, and Zeyu Jin.

From May 2023 to August 2023, I was a Research Intern at the NTT Communication Sciences Lab in Japan, supervised by Marc Delcroix, Atsunori Ogawa, and Takatomo Kano.

From July 2021 to August 2022, I was a Software Engineer at Texas Instruments, as part of the Ti.com e-commerce team. This collection of articles details some of the work I did on the team.

From April 2021 to July 2021, I was part of the UCF Security and Analytics Lab, supervised by Professor David Mohaisen.

From June 2020 to July 2022, I was a Research Assistant at the UCF Computational Biology Lab, supervised by Professor Wei Zhang.

From January 2020 to October 2021, I was part of the UCF Evolutionary Computation Lab, supervised by Professor Annie Wu.