About
I am a PhD student at the Electrical and Computer Engineering, UCLA, advised by Prof.Abeer Alwan.
Prior to this, I obtained a BSc degree with First Class Honours in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
My current research focuses on investigating the Automatic Speech Recognition.
Selected Publications
View All →Compositional domain adaptation for automatic speech recognition with headwise selective attention merging
Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Zilai Wang, Eray Eren, Abeer Alwan
Computer Speech & Language
Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domains
Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Mohan Shi, Kaiyuan Zhang, Abeer Alwan
Interspeech 2026
Mind the Shift: Using Delta SSL Embeddings to Enhance Child ASR
Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Abeer Alwan
ICASSP 2026
Selective Attention Merging for low resource tasks: A case study of Child ASR
Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Zilai Wang, Eray Eren, Abeer Alwan
ICASSP 2025
News
2026-06
Three papers have been accepted by Interspeech 2026 🎉
2026-01
Our work has been accepted by ICASSP 2026 🎉
2025-12
Passed my PhD Preliminary Exam!