Portrait of Karun Kumar

Karun Kumar

AI Researcher, Comcast Applied AI

About

I am part of Comcast's Applied AI Research group, where I lead Speech Machine Learning research. My work focuses on speech processing, multi-modal learning, and interpretability in deep learning — including research recognized with the Best Paper Award at ACL 2023.

I completed my MS in Computer Science at Syracuse University.

Publications & Patents

Papers

  1. Mechanisms of Misgeneralization in Physical Sequence Modeling
    Kento Nishi, Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Core Francisco Park, Hidenori Tanaka
    arXiv · 2026
  2. WhisTLE: Deeply Supervised, Text-Only Domain Adaptation for Small Pretrained Speech Recognition Transformers
    Akshat Pandey, Karun Kumar, Raphael Tang
    arXiv · 2025
  3. What the DAAM: Interpreting Stable Diffusion Using Cross Attention
    Raphael Tang, Linqing Liu, Akshat Pandey, Zhiying Jiang, Gefei Yang, Karun Kumar, Pontus Stenetorp, Jimmy Lin, Ferhan Ture
    ACL 2023 · Best Paper Award
  4. SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Gefei Yang, Akshat Pandey, Yajie Mao, Vladislav Belyaev, Madhuri Emmadi, Craig Murray, Ferhan Ture, Jimmy Lin
    EMNLP 2022 · Industry Track
  5. Temporal Early Exiting for Streaming Speech Commands Recognition
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, G. Craig Murray, Jimmy Lin
    ICASSP 2022
  6. Voice Query Auto Completion
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Ji Xin, Liming Zhang, Wenyan Li, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Junho Shin, Geoffrey Craig Murray, Jimmy Lin
    EMNLP 2021 · Oral

Patents

  1. Predictive Query Execution
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Wenyan Li, Liming Zhang, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Jun Ho Shin, Geoffrey Murray
    US Patent 12,277,931
  2. Systems and Methods for Managing Cascading Models
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, et al.
    US Patent App. 18/927,993
  3. Systems and Methods for Processing Voice Queries of Different Duration
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Geoffrey Craig Murray, Ferhan Ture
    US Patent App. 18/193,212
  4. Systems and Methods for Improved Automatic Speech Recognition Systems
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Liming Zhang, Wenyan Li, Pamela Shapiro, Yajie Mao, Gefei Yang, Jun Ho Shin, Geoffrey Craig Murray
    US Patent App. 18/066,174
  5. Methods and Systems for Voice Control
    Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Wenyan Li, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Yang Hu, Rui Min, Geoffrey Murray
    US Patent App. 17/566,036