Hello, I am Rithesh Kumar, a Senior Research Scientist on the Speech AI team at Adobe Research. I lead speech generation research focused on controllable text-to-speech synthesis, automatic dubbing, and speech editing. My work centers on scaling diffusion models and developing efficient distillation algorithms for multilingual audio generation.

Previously, I was Technical Lead for Audio Research at Descript Inc., where I built and shipped 4+ text-to-speech models powering the flagship Overdub and Regenerate features—enabling ultra-realistic voice cloning and text-based audio corrections.

As a firm believer in the bitter lesson, my research goal is to develop scalable multi-modal models that bridge the reasoning and general intelligence of LLMs with diffusion models that can synthesize natural signals like audio, video, and images at the highest quality.

Currrently, I live in Toronto, Ontario 🇨🇦.

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Education

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I completed my MSc in Computer Science (specializing in Artificial Intelligence) at the Mila lab in Université de Montréal supervised by Yoshua Bengio. During my MSc, I had the excellent opportunity to intern at Lyrebird and Microsoft Research - Montréal.

Earlier, I graduated from SSN College of Engineering (affiliated to Anna University) with a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering. I spent the final 2 years of my undergrad learning about deep learning, spending a summer at the Serre Lab in Brown University and collaborating with Prof. Yoshua Bengio at the Mila lab.

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