LISN · CNRS · Université Paris-Saclay

Romain Alves

Ph.D. student at LISN (CNRS – Université Paris-Saclay), working on emotional adaptation and evaluation of speech-to-speech large language models for assistive robotics, elderly care and AI ethics.

ABOUT

PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence at LISN

I am a PhD student at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Digital Sciences (LISN – CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay) since October 2025, supervised by Laurence Devillers, within the ANR HUMA-AI-NE chair.

My research focuses on emotional adaptation and evaluation of speech-to-speech large language models for safer and more controllable use by vulnerable users, particularly in the context of assistive robotics and elderly care.

I am particularly interested in multimodal foundation models, self-supervised learning, emotion recognition, human-robot interaction, as well as ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence systems.

I graduated from the Master of Science in Informatics (MOSIG) at Université Grenoble Alpes, where I developed a strong background in computer science, artificial intelligence and applied mathematics.

Affiliation LISN · CNRS · Université Paris-Saclay
PhD Topic Emotional Adaptation and Evaluation of Speech-to-Speech LLMs for Safer and More Controllable Use by Vulnerable Users
Interests Affective Computing · Multimodal AI · LLMs · Human-Robot Interaction

RESEARCH WORK

LLMs

Generative Information Retrieval with Autoregressive LLMs

Study of autoregressive language models for document identifier generation and information retrieval.

Affective Computing

Comparison of Multimodal Emotional Valence Classification Capabilities between Foundation Models and Speech-to-Speech Models

Evaluation of emotional recognition capabilities of audio, text and speech-to-speech models on multilingual spontaneous speech datasets.

HRI

Wizard of Oz Corpus for Elderly Users

Creation of a multimodal interaction corpus between elderly users and a social robot to study emotional AI in real-world contexts.

TEACHING

L2 · Université Paris-Saclay

Tutorial Classes – Formal Languages

Language theory, automata and grammars.

Polytech Saclay

Practical Sessions – Introduction to C++

Practical programming sessions and student supervision.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Large Language Models

Adaptation of generative LLMs into feature extractors (Moshi/Mimi).

Foundation Models

Feature extraction using self-supervised foundation models: WavLM and XLM-RoBERTa.

Multimodal AI

Design of unified and extensible data pipelines for audio and text modalities.

Data Engineering

Indexing and normalization of heterogeneous academic datasets (Multi-source Dataset Alignment).

Transfer Learning

Layer Freezing, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and adaptation of foundation models.

Human-Robot Interaction

Creation of a voice and video corpus involving elderly users based on Wizard of Oz interactions.

CONTACT

romalves@lisn.fr  ·  GitHub  ·  LinkedIn

LISN – UMR 9015 · Building 507, rue du Belvédère · 91405 Orsay, France