arXiv subjects

Eun-Jung Holden

Publications and source records attributed to Eun-Jung Holden.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark

Humans process rich auditory environments through various cognitive capabilities such as audio perception, audio reasoning and memory. Despite recent progress in large audio-language models (LALMs), current evaluation remains largely task- or domain-centric, focusing on end performance while ignoring underlying auditory cognitive behaviors. This gap between how auditory cognition is understood in humans and how it is evaluated in LALMs hinders the interpretation of model behaviour in underlying capabilities and limits alignment with human auditory objectives. We introduce RAIL, a human-centric benchmark grounded in the Cattell--Horn--Carroll (CHC) framework, which formalises auditory cognition into five core capabilities, and develops them into structured evaluation tasks with principled data curation and human-aligned evaluation protocols. Evaluating 26 LALMs reveals strong performance in knowledge-related tasks but weak auditory perception and memory, reflecting reliance on language-based pretraining. Limited reasoning under auditory settings further suggests a mismatch between existing training paradigms and human-like auditory reasoning, as well as over-reasoning at the cost of efficiency. Six LALMs exceed human performance in general, while auditory processing all lags behind human. Overall, RAIL establishes a new framework for human-aligned evaluation of auditory intelligence.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

VoxMem: Benchmarking Multimodal Memory in Large Audio Language Models

Spoken conversational systems must recover information from prior interactions (i.e., memory), yet relevant information in speech extends beyond what was said to who said it, how it was spoken, and what was audible, information that exists only in the audio signal and cannot be recovered from a transcript. Beyond what to remember, memory also demands diverse operations: retrieving a single fact, integrating evidence across turns, tracking an evolving state. Real interactions further unfold across sessions, meaning information accumulates across distinct episodes rather than a single continuous recording. Existing benchmarks fall short on all three dimensions: they focus primarily on lexical content, adopt limited and ad hoc memory operations, and treat memory as a single-session problem. We argue that principled memory evaluation requires jointly characterizing the acoustic evidence to be retained and the operations applied to it, and introduce a taxonomy along these two axes. Building on this taxonomy, we present VoxMem: 3,196 evaluation instances over 34,743 spoken sessions (177 hours) crossing four acoustic evidence types (speech semantics, speaker identity, paralinguistic cues, environmental sound) with four memory operations (information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal tracking, and answer refusal), grounded in multi-session histories and stratified across context budgets from 8K to 64K tokens. Evaluating 15 LALMs, no model exceeds 40% at 32K. Models retain what was said far better than who said it, how, or what was audible, a gap that widens for complex operations, grows with history length, and manifests as qualitatively distinct failure modes across evidence types. VoxMem aims to provide a foundation to measure and drive progress on the full scope of spoken conversational memory.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

MineTRACE: An Evidence-Grounded Interactive Reasoning System for Mineral Prospectivity

Mineral exploration requires integrating heterogeneous geochemical, geophysical, and geological evidence, yet existing prospectivity systems often provide only opaque scores or heatmaps. We present MineTRACE, a web-based system for evidence-grounded exploration of eight commodities: Cu, Au, Ni, W, Sn, Co, Ta, and Mn. Users can explore prospectivity maps, query locations or regions, inspect supporting evidence, and interact through natural language. A transparent expert tree, informed by geological knowledge and known deposits, combines multi-source evidence into interpretable prospectivity scores. For a new location, the conversational assistant retrieves the score and supporting evidence from the analysis pipeline and presents them in natural language. The scorer achieves spatial AUC values of up to 0.917 across different test scenarios, while end-to-end evaluation assesses query accuracy and response grounding. MineTRACE makes public geoscience data easier to access, interpret, and verify, supporting more efficient and transparent mineral exploration.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

FiLoRA: Focus-and-Ignore LoRA for Controllable Feature Reliance

Multimodal foundation models integrate heterogeneous signals across modalities, yet it remains unclear whether their predictions can be controlled by explicitly modulating reliance on different internal feature pathways. Existing approaches to shortcut and spurious behavior primarily rely on post hoc analysis or data-level interventions, offering limited ability to directly intervene on how models use information. We introduce FiLoRA (Focus-and-Ignore LoRA), an instruction-conditioned, parameter-efficient adaptation framework that enables controllable modulation of feature reliance while keeping the task and predictive objective fixed. FiLoRA decomposes adaptation into feature-aligned low-rank modules and applies instruction-conditioned gating, allowing natural language instructions to act as computation-level control signals over internal representations. We evaluate FiLoRA across both controlled classification settings and generative multimodal tasks, and under a range of instruction types, including natural and compositional instructions. Results show that FiLoRA induces consistent and interpretable shifts in feature reliance, selectively amplifying or suppressing different feature groups in accordance with the instruction, without altering task semantics. Our findings suggest that instruction-conditioned parameter adaptation can serve as a practical mechanism for intervening on internal model behavior, providing a new perspective on controllability and analysis of multimodal systems beyond output-level prompting or post hoc interpretation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

QuaSR: Quality-Aware Sample Reweighting for Pacific Indigenous Speech Recognition

Training automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for low-resource languages is challenging due to limited data and highly variable supervision quality. In particular, Pacific Indigenous speech corpora often exhibit heterogeneous acoustic conditions, transcript inconsistencies, and varying degrees of acoustic-text alignment reliability, making standard fine-tuning approaches sensitive to noisy or misleading supervision signals. In this work, we propose QuaSR, a simple yet effective weighting framework that combines data-side reliability with model-side learnability to improve ASR adaptation. Specifically, we estimate data reliability from acoustic, transcription, and alignment, while measuring learnability using training loss from the model. These two complementary signals are integrated into a unified sample utility score to produce training weights for the samples. We also evaluated across four Pacific Indigenous languages, which shows that the proposed utility scores reliably correlate with adaptation performance. Furthermore, QuaSR consistently improves ASR adaptation over standard fine-tuning and alternative data selection strategies, highlighting a new way to leverage difficulty scores for low-resource speech learning.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Activation Steering for Accent Adaptation in Large Audio Language Models

Accent variability remains a major source of errors in automatic speech recognition, yet most adaptation methods rely on parameter fine-tuning without understanding where accent information is encoded. We treat accent variation as an interpretable subspace in hidden representations and investigate whether it can be identified and controlled directly in activation space. We extract layer-wise encoder activations and estimate mean-shift directions capturing accent-induced representation shifts. By injecting these directions into individual layers and measuring how they align accented and standard embeddings, we derive a layer-wise accent sensitivity profile, revealing that accent information concentrates in a narrow band of middle encoder layers. Leveraging this structure, we further introduce parameter-free accent steering that modifies representations during inference without updating model weights. Experiments across eight accents show consistent word error rate reductions.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Continual Adaptation for Pacific Indigenous Speech Recognition

Speech foundation models struggle with low-resource Pacific Indigenous languages because of severe data scarcity. Furthermore, full fine-tuning risks catastrophic forgetting. To address this gap, we present an empirical study adapting models to real-world Pacific datasets. We investigate the impact of data volume, adaptation strategies, and representational drift on speech foundation models for various Pacific languages. Additionally, we analyze a continual learning framework for sequential language acquisition. Empirical results across three distinct Pacific Indigenous languages demonstrate that adapting to these linguistically distant languages induces severe internal representational drift. Consequently, these models face a strict plasticity and stability dilemma. While LoRA adapts well initially, it suffers from catastrophic forgetting during sequential learning. Ultimately, this study highlights the urgent need for robust adaptation strategies tailored to underrepresented languages.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking Continual Learning for Speech and Audio: A Representation-Centric Taxonomy and Open Problems

Speech and audio systems operate in inherently non-stationary environments, yet continual learning (CL) research in this domain, especially in the foundation model era, remains fragmented that fail to account for the coupled, geometry-sensitive nature of acoustic representations. Modern speech foundation models operate over highly entangled, continuous representations that jointly encode linguistic, speaker, and paralinguistic factors within a shared latent space. CL is therefore fundamentally about preserving and evolving shared representation structure rather than retaining isolated task knowledge. In this work, we revisit CL for speech from a representation-centered perspective, and introduce a new taxonomy that organizes CL according to how underlying representation geometry evolves under non-stationary acoustic conditions. We further identify key mismatches between current CL assumptions and speech foundation model behavior, and finally outline a set of open challenges and future research directions.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

Why Can't They Remember? Uncovering Representation and Retrieval Bottlenecks in Multi-Turn Acoustic Memory

Large audio language models (LALMs) process both speech and environmental acoustic cues, yet struggle to retain non-speech information across multi-turn interactions. The performance gap between semantic (speech) and acoustic (non-speech) understanding remains poorly understood, and the underlying mechanisms of representation and retrieval are still unclear. This work introduces EnvMem, a controlled multi-turn benchmark designed to study this gap and identify the root causes of failures at the representation (i.e., latent embeddings) and retrieval levels (i.e., attention allocation). We further conduct post-hoc interventions to probe representational structure and attention dynamics. Our results reveal representational trajectory drift as the key failure mode, while showing that attention allocation plays a limited role in explaining the observed degradation. Overall, we provide a systematic framework for analyzing and improving non-linguistic memory in long-context LALMs, shedding light on future data and training design for robust acoustic memory modeling.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2026

MUSEKG: A Knowledge Graph Over Museum Collections

Digitisation in the cultural heritage sector has produced large but fragmented repositories of museum collection data, spanning structured catalogue records, images, and unstructured descriptions. Existing museum information systems often make it difficult to integrate these sources into a unified, queryable representation that supports relation-aware exploration. We present MuseKG, an interactive knowledge graph system that organises heterogeneous museum data into a typed graph that links objects, people, organisations, images, image-derived labels, and extracted semantic entities within a coherent schema. MuseKG supports natural-language queries by grounding user questions to graph entities and retrieving a compact neighbourhood of evidence for answer generation. Through an interactive demonstration on real museum collections, we show that MuseKG supports common exploration tasks such as attribute lookup, relation exploration, and relation-aware retrieval, with answers that remain inspectable via explicit graph structures.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

GeoChemAD: Benchmarking Unsupervised Geochemical Anomaly Detection for Mineral Exploration

Geochemical anomaly detection plays a critical role in mineral exploration as deviations from regional geochemical baselines may indicate mineralization. Existing studies suffer from two key limitations: (1) single region scenarios which limit model generalizability; (2) proprietary datasets, which makes result reproduction unattainable. In this work, we introduce \textbf{GeoChemAD}, an open-source benchmark dataset compiled from government-led geological surveys, covering multiple regions, sampling sources, and target elements. The dataset comprises eight subsets representing diverse spatial scales and sampling conditions. To establish strong baselines, we reproduce and benchmark a range of unsupervised anomaly detection methods, including statistical models, generative and transformer-based approaches. Furthermore, we propose \textbf{GeoChemFormer}, a transformer-based framework that leverages self-supervised pretraining to learn target-element-aware geochemical representations for spatial samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoChemFormer consistently achieves superior and robust performance across all eight subsets, outperforming existing unsupervised methods in both anomaly detection accuracy and generalization capability. The proposed dataset and framework provide a foundation for reproducible research and future development in this direction.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Adapting Where It Matters: Depth-Aware Adaptation for Efficient Multilingual Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages

Recent speech foundation models excel at multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) for high-resource languages, but adapting them to low-resource languages remains challenging due to data scarcity and efficiency constraints. Full-model fine-tuning is computationally expensive and prone to overfitting, while parameter-efficient methods like LoRA apply adaptation uniformly across layers, overlooking internal representations thus compromising effectiveness and efficiency. We analyze multilingual ASR models and reveal a U-shaped adaptability pattern: early and late layers are language-specific and require more adaptation, while intermediate layers retain shared semantics and need less. Building on this observation, we propose DAMA, a Depth-Aware Model Adaptation framework that allocates adaptation capacity according to each layer's role. DAMA also introduces Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based initialization to constrain adaptation and preserve the U-shaped pattern, as well as a frozen middle-layer basis for further efficiency. Evaluated on 18 low-resource languages across two benchmark datasets, DAMA matches or surpasses state-of-the-art accuracy with 80% fewer trainable parameters, achieves a 29% error reduction under extreme data scarcity, and significantly improves memory, training time, and computational efficiency over baselines. These results highlight the benefits of structure-aware adaptation for efficient, scalable multilingual ASR.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

SPANER: Shared Prompt Aligner for Multimodal Semantic Representation

Recent advances in multimodal Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) have significantly improved performance on downstream tasks such as few-shot retrieval. However, most existing approaches focus on task-specific gains while neglecting the structure of the multimodal embedding space. As a result, modality-specific representations often remain isolated, limiting cross-modal generalisation. In this work, we introduce Shared Prompt AligNER (SPANER), a modality-agnostic PEFT framework designed to embed inputs from diverse modalities into a unified semantic space. At its core, SPANER employs a shared prompt mechanism that acts as a conceptual anchor, enabling semantically related instances to converge spatially regardless of modality. This shared prompt design is inherently extensible, supporting the seamless integration of additional modalities, such as audio, without altering the core architecture. Through comprehensive experiments across vision-language and audio-visual benchmarks, SPANER demonstrates competitive few-shot retrieval performance while preserving high semantic coherence in the learned embedding space. Our results highlight the importance of aligning embedding structures, rather than merely tuning adapter weights, for scalable multimodal learning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

SymbioticRAG: Enhancing Document Intelligence Through Human-LLM Symbiotic Collaboration

We present \textbf{SymbioticRAG}, a novel framework that fundamentally reimagines Retrieval-Augmented Generation~(RAG) systems by establishing a bidirectional learning relationship between humans and machines. Our approach addresses two critical challenges in current RAG systems: the inherently human-centered nature of relevance determination and users' progression from "unconscious incompetence" in query formulation. SymbioticRAG introduces a two-tier solution where Level 1 enables direct human curation of retrieved content through interactive source document exploration, while Level 2 aims to build personalized retrieval models based on captured user interactions. We implement Level 1 through three key components: (1)~a comprehensive document processing pipeline with specialized models for layout detection, OCR, and extraction of tables, formulas, and figures; (2)~an extensible retriever module supporting multiple retrieval strategies; and (3)~an interactive interface that facilitates both user engagement and interaction data logging. We experiment Level 2 implementation via a retriever strategy incorporated LLM summarized user intention from user interaction logs. To maintain high-quality data preparation, we develop a human-on-the-loop validation interface that improves pipeline output while advancing research in specialized extraction tasks. Evaluation across three scenarios (literature review, geological exploration, and education) demonstrates significant improvements in retrieval relevance and user satisfaction compared to traditional RAG approaches. To facilitate broader research and further advancement of SymbioticRAG Level 2 implementation, we will make our system openly accessible to the research community.

cs.IR↗