Tiantian Feng

This amazing picture was taken by my wife at Skyline Trail, Mount Rainier, 2023.

PS: Prepare enough water for this trail but make sure you are not the one carrying it.

(I am on a unique parental leaving situation, and I would be having limited bandwidth to respond your emails till October/November. Sorry that if I cannot respond your email in a timely manner.)

My name is Tiantian Feng, and I grew up in Leshan, China, which is famously for Leshan Giant Buddha. I studied both in Chengdu (both middle school and high school at Chengdu Foreign Language School) and Nanjing (Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, undergraduate). I obtained my master degree at the University of Southern California afterwards. I recently completed my Ph.D. in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at University of Southern California in 2023. I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Shrikanth Narayanan, a globally recognized scientist in speech modeling, linguistics, affective computing, and human understanding.

My research focuses on leveraging sensors and computational methods for understanding natural human behaviors in healthcare applications. I also have a particular interest in building technology that is private and broadly accessible. I have been focused on developing datasets and benchmark that are shareable across different community. My research invovles applications such as speech understanding, multimodal understanding, and bio-signal processing, etc. Additionally, I have hands-on experience in industrial sensor design and deploying sensors in research studies. I have interned at both Meta and Amazon as the research scientist.

I am currently a postdoc researcher in SAIL lab at USC, and I am actively looking for tenure-track or similar positions in academia. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like to collaborate.

News

Dec 10, 2025	I will give a talk on-Developing Robust Speaker Diarization for Child-Adult Dyadic Interaction in ASRU 2025 Satellite Workshop-AI for Children’s Speech and Language!
Nov 23, 2025	Our Voxlect benchmark has been accepted to 2026 KDD Dataset and Benchmark track, congratulations to all co-authors!
Nov 14, 2025	I will be giving an invited talk on “Toward Human-Centered Computing for Behavioral Understanding in Healthcare Applications” to THE Ohio State University Talk Details!
Aug 20, 2025	7 papers accepted and will be presented at INTERSPEECH 2025!
Aug 20, 2025	Our work has won the 2nd place in 2025 INTERSPEECH Speech Emotion Recognition Challenge - Task1!
Aug 20, 2025	Our work has won the 1st place in 2025 INTERSPEECH Speech Emotion Recognition Challenge - Task2!
Mar 20, 2025	4 papers accepted and will be presented at ICASSP 2025!
Jun 14, 2024	3 papers accepted at INTERSPEECH 2024!
Jun 10, 2024	Will serve as a session chair for “Sensing for Sleep, Stress, and Emotion” at EMBC 2024!
Apr 22, 2024	Receive IEEE EMBC NextGen Scholar Award!

Selected Publications

Preprint Benchmark

Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialects and Regional Languages Around the Globe

Tiantian Feng , Kevin Huang , Anfeng Xu , Xuan Shi , Thanathai Lertpetchpun , Jihwan Lee , Yoonjeong Lee , Dani Byrd , and Shrikanth Narayanan

arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01691 (Accepted to 2026 KDD Dataset and Benchmark Track), 2025

Bib

@article{feng2025voxlect,
  title = {Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialects and Regional Languages Around the Globe},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Huang, Kevin and Xu, Anfeng and Shi, Xuan and Lertpetchpun, Thanathai and Lee, Jihwan and Lee, Yoonjeong and Byrd, Dani and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01691 (Accepted to 2026 KDD Dataset and Benchmark Track)},
  year = {2025},
  abbr2 = {Benchmark},
}

Preprint Benchmark

Vox-Profile: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Characterizing Diverse Speaker and Speech Traits

Tiantian Feng , Jihwan Lee , Anfeng Xu , Yoonjeong Lee , Thanathai Lertpetchpun , Xuan Shi , Helin Wang , Thomas Thebaud , Laureano Moro-Velazquez , Dani Byrd , and 1 more author

arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.14648, 2025

Bib

@article{feng2025vox,
  title = {Vox-Profile: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Characterizing Diverse Speaker and Speech Traits},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Lee, Jihwan and Xu, Anfeng and Lee, Yoonjeong and Lertpetchpun, Thanathai and Shi, Xuan and Wang, Helin and Thebaud, Thomas and Moro-Velazquez, Laureano and Byrd, Dani and others},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.14648},
  year = {2025},
  abbr2 = {Benchmark},
}

Preprint Dataset

TILES-2018 Sleep Benchmark Dataset: A Longitudinal Wearable Sleep Data Set of Hospital Workers for Modeling and Understanding Sleep Behaviors

Tiantian Feng , Brandon M Booth , Karel Mundnich , Emily Zhou , Benjamin Girault , Kristina Lerman , and Shrikanth Narayanan

arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.03520, 2025

Bib

@article{feng2025tiles,
  title = {TILES-2018 Sleep Benchmark Dataset: A Longitudinal Wearable Sleep Data Set of Hospital Workers for Modeling and Understanding Sleep Behaviors},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Booth, Brandon M and Mundnich, Karel and Zhou, Emily and Girault, Benjamin and Lerman, Kristina and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.03520},
  year = {2025},
  abbr2 = {Dataset},
}

Challenge Winner Speech Emotion

Developing a Top-tier Framework in Naturalistic Conditions Challenge for Categorized Emotion Prediction: From Speech Foundation Models and Learning Objective to Data Augmentation and Engineering Choices

Tiantian Feng , Thanathai Lertpetchpun , Dani Byrd , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In Interspeech 2025 , 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{feng25_interspeech,
  title = {{Developing a Top-tier Framework in Naturalistic Conditions Challenge for Categorized Emotion Prediction: From Speech Foundation Models and Learning Objective to Data Augmentation and Engineering Choices}},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Lertpetchpun, Thanathai and Byrd, Dani and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {{Interspeech 2025}},
  pages = {4643--4647},
  doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1163},
  issn = {2958-1796},
  abbr2 = {Speech Emotion},
}

Child-centered Technology INTERSPEECH 2025

Egocentric Speaker Classification in Child-Adult Dyadic Interactions: From Sensing to Computational Modeling

Tiantian Feng , Anfeng Xu , Xuan Shi , Somer Bishop , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In Interspeech 2025 , 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{feng25b_interspeech,
  title = {{Egocentric Speaker Classification in Child-Adult Dyadic Interactions: From Sensing to Computational Modeling}},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Xu, Anfeng and Shi, Xuan and Bishop, Somer and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {{Interspeech 2025}},
  pages = {2835--2839},
  doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2025-1216},
  issn = {2958-1796},
  abbr2 = {INTERSPEECH 2025},
}

Scientific Data Dataset

TILES-2018, a longitudinal physiologic and behavioral data set of hospital workers

Karel Mundnich , Brandon M Booth , Michelle l’Hommedieu , Tiantian Feng , Benjamin Girault , Justin L’hommedieu , Mackenzie Wildman , Sophia Skaaden , Amrutha Nadarajan , Jennifer L Villatte , and 1 more author

Scientific Data, 2020

Bib Website

@article{mundnich2020tiles,
  title = {TILES-2018, a longitudinal physiologic and behavioral data set of hospital workers},
  author = {Mundnich, Karel and Booth, Brandon M and l'Hommedieu, Michelle and Feng, Tiantian and Girault, Benjamin and L'hommedieu, Justin and Wildman, Mackenzie and Skaaden, Sophia and Nadarajan, Amrutha and Villatte, Jennifer L and others},
  journal = {Scientific Data},
  volume = {7},
  number = {1},
  pages = {354},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Nature Publishing Group UK London},
  abbr2 = {Dataset},
}

Scientific Data Dataset

TILES-2019: A longitudinal physiologic and behavioral data set of medical residents in an intensive care unit

Joanna C Yau , Benjamin Girault , Tiantian Feng , Karel Mundnich , Amrutha Nadarajan , Brandon M Booth , Emilio Ferrara , Kristina Lerman , Eric Hsieh , and Shrikanth Narayanan

Scientific Data, 2022

Bib Website

@article{yau2022tiles,
  title = {TILES-2019: A longitudinal physiologic and behavioral data set of medical residents in an intensive care unit},
  author = {Yau, Joanna C and Girault, Benjamin and Feng, Tiantian and Mundnich, Karel and Nadarajan, Amrutha and Booth, Brandon M and Ferrara, Emilio and Lerman, Kristina and Hsieh, Eric and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  journal = {Scientific Data},
  volume = {9},
  number = {1},
  pages = {536},
  year = {2022},
  publisher = {Nature Publishing Group UK London},
  abbr2 = {Dataset},
}

ACM Multimedia Dataset

MM-AU: Towards Multimodal Understanding of Advertisement Videos

Digbalay Bose , Rajat Hebbar , Tiantian Feng , Krishna Somandepalli , Anfeng Xu , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia , 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{bose2023mm,
  title = {MM-AU: Towards Multimodal Understanding of Advertisement Videos},
  author = {Bose, Digbalay and Hebbar, Rajat and Feng, Tiantian and Somandepalli, Krishna and Xu, Anfeng and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia},
  pages = {86--95},
  year = {2023},
  abbr2 = {Dataset},
}

Preprint Generative AI

Can Text-to-image Model Assist Multi-modal Learning for Visual Recognition with Visual Modality Missing?

Tiantian Feng , Daniel Yang , Digbalay Bose , and Shrikanth Narayanan

arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.09036, 2024

Bib

@article{feng2024can,
  title = {Can Text-to-image Model Assist Multi-modal Learning for Visual Recognition with Visual Modality Missing?},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Yang, Daniel and Bose, Digbalay and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.09036},
  year = {2024},
  abbr2 = {Generative AI},
}

Voice Privacy Generative AI

Unlocking Foundation Models for Privacy-Enhancing Speech Understanding: An Early Study on Low Resource Speech Training Leveraging Label-guided Synthetic Speech Content

Tiantian Feng , Digbalay Bose , Xuan Shi , and Shrikanth Narayanan

arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.07791, 2023

Bib

@article{feng2023unlocking,
  title = {Unlocking Foundation Models for Privacy-Enhancing Speech Understanding: An Early Study on Low Resource Speech Training Leveraging Label-guided Synthetic Speech Content},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Bose, Digbalay and Shi, Xuan and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.07791},
  year = {2023},
  abbr2 = {Generative AI},
}

Preprint Generative AI

GPT-FL: Generative pre-trained model-assisted federated learning

Tuo Zhang* , Tiantian Feng* , Samiul Alam , Mi Zhang , Shrikanth S Narayanan , and Salman Avestimehr

arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.02210, 2023

Bib

@article{zhang2023gpt,
  title = {GPT-FL: Generative pre-trained model-assisted federated learning},
  author = {Zhang*, Tuo and Feng*, Tiantian and Alam, Samiul and Zhang, Mi and Narayanan, Shrikanth S and Avestimehr, Salman},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.02210},
  year = {2023},
  abbr2 = {Generative AI},
}

Journal Trustworthiness

A Review of Speech-centric Trustworthy Machine Learning: Privacy, Safety, and Fairness

Tiantian Feng , Rajat Hebbar , Nicholas Mehlman , Xuan Shi , Aditya Kommineni , and Shrikanth Narayanan

APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, 2023

Bib

@article{feng2023review,
  title = {A Review of Speech-centric Trustworthy Machine Learning: Privacy, Safety, and Fairness},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Hebbar, Rajat and Mehlman, Nicholas and Shi, Xuan and Kommineni, Aditya and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  journal = {APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing},
  volume = {12},
  number = {3},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Now Publishers, Inc.},
  abbr2 = {Trustworthiness},
}

ICASSP 2024 Trustworthiness

TRUST-SER: On The Trustworthiness Of Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Speech Embeddings For Speech Emotion Recognition

Tiantian Feng , Rajat Hebbar , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In ICASSP 2024-2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) , 2024

Bib Code

@inproceedings{feng2024trust,
  title = {TRUST-SER: On The Trustworthiness Of Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Speech Embeddings For Speech Emotion Recognition},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Hebbar, Rajat and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  booktitle = {ICASSP 2024-2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  pages = {11201--11205},
  year = {2024},
  organization = {IEEE},
  abbr2 = {Trustworthiness},
}

SIGKDD 2023 Federated Learning

FedMultimodal: A Benchmark for Multimodal Federated Learning

Tiantian Feng , Digbalay Bose , Tuo Zhang , Rajat Hebbar , Anil Ramakrishna , Rahul Gupta , Mi Zhang , Salman Avestimehr , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining , 2023

Bib Code

@inproceedings{feng2023fedmultimodal,
  title = {FedMultimodal: A Benchmark for Multimodal Federated Learning},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Bose, Digbalay and Zhang, Tuo and Hebbar, Rajat and Ramakrishna, Anil and Gupta, Rahul and Zhang, Mi and Avestimehr, Salman and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining},
  pages = {4035--4045},
  year = {2023},
  abbr2 = {Federated Learning},
}

ICASSP 2023 Federated Learning

FedAudio: A federated learning benchmark for audio tasks

Tuo Zhang , Tiantian Feng , Samiul Alam , Sunwoo Lee , Mi Zhang , Shrikanth S Narayanan , and Salman Avestimehr

In ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) , 2023

Bib Code

@inproceedings{zhang2023fedaudio,
  title = {FedAudio: A federated learning benchmark for audio tasks},
  author = {Zhang, Tuo and Feng, Tiantian and Alam, Samiul and Lee, Sunwoo and Zhang, Mi and Narayanan, Shrikanth S and Avestimehr, Salman},
  booktitle = {ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  pages = {1--5},
  year = {2023},
  organization = {IEEE},
  abbr2 = {Federated Learning},
}

INTERSPEECH 2022 Federated Learning

User-Level Differential Privacy against Attribute Inference Attack of Speech Emotion Recognition on Federated Learning

Tiantian Feng , Raghuveer Peri , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In Proc. Interspeech 2022 , 2022

Bib Code

@inproceedings{feng22b_interspeech,
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Peri, Raghuveer and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  title = {{User-Level Differential Privacy against Attribute Inference Attack of Speech Emotion Recognition on Federated Learning}},
  year = {2022},
  booktitle = {Proc. Interspeech 2022},
  pages = {5055--5059},
  doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10060},
  abbr2 = {Federated Learning},
}

ACII 2023 Foundation Model

PEFT-SER: On the use of parameter efficient transfer learning approaches for speech emotion recognition using pre-trained speech models

Tiantian Feng , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In 2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) , 2023

Bib Code

@inproceedings{feng2023peft,
  title = {PEFT-SER: On the use of parameter efficient transfer learning approaches for speech emotion recognition using pre-trained speech models},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  booktitle = {2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII)},
  pages = {1--8},
  year = {2023},
  organization = {IEEE},
  abbr2 = {Foundation Model},
}

Scientific Reports Wearables

A multimodal analysis of physical activity, sleep, and work shift in nurses with wearable sensor data

Tiantian Feng , Brandon M Booth , Brooke Baldwin-Rodrı́guez , Felipe Osorno , and Shrikanth Narayanan

Scientific reports, 2021

Bib Code

@article{feng2021multimodal,
  title = {A multimodal analysis of physical activity, sleep, and work shift in nurses with wearable sensor data},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Booth, Brandon M and Baldwin-Rodr{\'\i}guez, Brooke and Osorno, Felipe and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  journal = {Scientific reports},
  volume = {11},
  number = {1},
  pages = {8693},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {Nature Publishing Group UK London},
  abbr2 = {Wearables},
}

Mobisys Workshop Wearables

Tiles Audio Recorder: An Unobtrusive Wearable Solution to Track Audio Activity

Tiantian Feng , Amrutha Nadarajan , Colin Vaz , Brandon Booth , and Shrikanth Narayanan

In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Wearable Systems and Applications , 2018

Bib Code

@inproceedings{feng2018tiles,
  title = {Tiles Audio Recorder: An Unobtrusive Wearable Solution to Track Audio Activity},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Nadarajan, Amrutha and Vaz, Colin and Booth, Brandon and Narayanan, Shrikanth},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Wearable Systems and Applications},
  pages = {33--38},
  year = {2018},
  abbr2 = {Wearables},
}

ICASSP 2019 Wearables

Discovering optimal variable-length time series motifs in large-scale wearable recordings of human bio-behavioral signals

Tiantian Feng , and Shrikanth S Narayanan

In ICASSP 2019-2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) , 2019

Bib

@inproceedings{feng2019discovering,
  title = {Discovering optimal variable-length time series motifs in large-scale wearable recordings of human bio-behavioral signals},
  author = {Feng, Tiantian and Narayanan, Shrikanth S},
  booktitle = {ICASSP 2019-2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  pages = {7615--7619},
  year = {2019},
  organization = {IEEE},
  abbr2 = {Wearables}
}