arXiv subjects

Bengu Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Bengu Wu.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Preference Optimization with LALM Feedback for Continuous Autoregressive Non-Verbal Vocalization Generation

We propose a preference optimization framework with Large Audio-Language Model (LALM) feedback for controllable non-verbal vocalization (NVV) generation in continuous autoregressive speech models. To construct preference data without human preference annotation, we build a bilingual prompt corpus by combining NVV-injected real transcripts with LLM-generated semantically aligned prompts, perform stochastic model rollouts, and use a LALM to rank candidate utterances and form same-prompt chosen--rejected pairs. We then adopt a two-stage optimization strategy: Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RSFT) first adapts the model to LALM-selected high-scoring samples, followed by Anchored Flow-DPO, which formulates pairwise preference optimization using utterance-level flow-matching loss and retains the chosen-sample flow-matching objective as an SFT anchor. This design enables DPO-style preference learning without explicit sequence likelihoods while preserving direct supervision on preferred realizations. On the official 1,600-utterance NVVSpeech Challenge Track~2 test set, our method achieves a Final Track2Score of \textbf{75.80} (79.39 ZH / 72.21 EN), outperforming the VoxCPM2 baseline by \textbf{+1.84}. The improvements are mainly driven by higher NVV Accuracy and NVV Perceptual Effect, while Overall Quality remains stable.

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arXiv2026

Source-Adaptive Data Curation for Bilingual NVV-Aware ASR

Nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs), such as laughter, sighs, breaths, and coughs, convey affective and interactional information that conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often discard. We present a bilingual Mandarin-English system for Track 1 of the NVVSpeech Challenge at ISCSLP 2026, which requires joint transcription of lexical content and 16 NVV categories at their transcript-relative positions. Our NVV-Aware Whisper adapts Whisper-medium through checkpoint-compatible vocabulary remapping, enabling lexical tokens and inline NVV tags to be decoded within a unified autoregressive sequence without expanding the vocabulary. To provide reliable and diverse supervision, we further introduce a source-adaptive data curation strategy that refines public NVV corpora through acoustic augmentation and multimodal LLM filtering, while mining spontaneous NVVs from in-the-wild media through automated preprocessing and annotation. Under the official bilingual evaluation protocol, the proposed system improves final score from 33.32 to 53.61, with ablations confirming the complementary benefits of the proposed data-curation components.

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arXiv2026

SpeechAnnotator: A Context-Aware Multi-Agent Framework and Benchmark for Multidimensional Speech Annotation

Recent controllable speech generation requires training data with fine-grained annotations of speaker traits, prosody, emotion, paralinguistic cues, acoustic scenes, and context. Existing workflows often rely on manual correction, paid hosted multimodal services, or fixed processing chains, which limits large-scale data processing through annotation cost, external-service dependence, or weak cross-stage recovery. We introduce SpeechAnnotator, a locally deployable, context-aware multi-agent framework built entirely from open-source models and tools. Supporting frontend modules first obtain speaker-aware segments and final segment transcripts, while prior evidence extractors attach heterogeneous segment-level cues. Three specialist agents then collaborate through shared state: the Planning Agent converts local audio evidence, speaker history, neighboring segments, and recording-level context into field-specific contracts; the Labeling Agent performs contract-guided multimodal prediction for directly observable attributes; and the Review Agent runs a bounded review loop that checks evidence support and cross-segment consistency, triggering relabeling only for unsupported or inconsistent fields. To address the fragmentation of existing evaluation resources across isolated tasks and narrow-domain test sets, we introduce SpeechAnnotator-Bench (SA-Bench), containing 8.87 hours of human-annotated audio across nine source formats, together with SpeechAnnotator-Eval (SA-Eval), which separates Timeline-Eval for speaker-aware timeline recovery, Closed-Eval for finite-set attributes, and Open-Eval for open-ended attributes. Experiments and ablations show that SpeechAnnotator provides a locally deployable alternative to commercial audio-capable systems, while the bounded review loop improves multidimensional annotation through evidence- and context-aware field-level recovery.

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arXiv2026

MINT-Bench: A Comprehensive Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction-Following Text-to-Speech

Instruction-following text-to-speech (TTS) has emerged as an important capability for controllable and expressive speech generation, yet its evaluation remains underdeveloped due to limited benchmark coverage, weak diagnostic granularity, and insufficient multilingual support. We present \textbf{MINT-Bench}, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark for instruction-following TTS. MINT-Bench is built upon a hierarchical multi-axis taxonomy, a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline, and a hierarchical hybrid evaluation protocol that jointly assesses content consistency, instruction following, and perceptual quality. Experiments across ten languages show that current systems remain far from solved: frontier commercial systems lead overall, while leading open-source models become highly competitive and can even outperform commercial counterparts in localized settings such as Chinese. The benchmark further reveals that harder compositional and paralinguistic controls remain major bottlenecks for current systems. We release MINT-Bench together with the data construction and evaluation toolkit to support future research on controllable, multilingual, and diagnostically grounded TTS evaluation. The leaderboard and demo are available at https://aslp-lab.github.io/MINT-Bench-Demo/

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arXiv2026

VoiceSculptor: Your Voice, Designed By You

Despite rapid progress in text-to-speech (TTS), open-source systems still lack truly instruction-following, fine-grained control over core speech attributes (e.g., pitch, speaking rate, age, emotion, and style). We present VoiceSculptor, an open-source unified system that bridges this gap by integrating instruction-based voice design and high-fidelity voice cloning in a single framework. It generates controllable speaker timbre directly from natural-language descriptions, supports iterative refinement via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and provides attribute-level edits across multiple dimensions. The designed voice is then rendered into a prompt waveform and fed into a cloning model to enable high-fidelity timbre transfer for downstream speech synthesis. VoiceSculptor achieves open-source state-of-the-art (SOTA) on InstructTTSEval-Zh, and is fully open-sourced, including code and pretrained models, to advance reproducible instruction-controlled TTS research.

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arXiv2017

AISHELL-1: An Open-Source Mandarin Speech Corpus and A Speech Recognition Baseline

An open-source Mandarin speech corpus called AISHELL-1 is released. It is by far the largest corpus which is suitable for conducting the speech recognition research and building speech recognition systems for Mandarin. The recording procedure, including audio capturing devices and environments are presented in details. The preparation of the related resources, including transcriptions and lexicon are described. The corpus is released with a Kaldi recipe. Experimental results implies that the quality of audio recordings and transcriptions are promising.

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