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Jinyu Li

Publications and source records attributed to Jinyu Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

LLM-Anchored Paralinguistic Enrichment for Alzheimer's Disease Detection

Speech-based automatic detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) provides a non-invasive and scalable approach to early cognitive screening. AD affects both lexical-semantic organization and speech production, including atypical pauses and word elongations. However, existing methods have yet to fully integrate these paralinguistic cues with linguistic content. We propose LLM-Anchored Paralinguistic Enrichment (LAPE), which enriches LLM-derived linguistic representations with paralinguistic cues through three coordinated innovations. The first is prosodic event textualization, which enables the LLM to model pauses and elongations jointly with lexical content by encoding them as explicit markers with bounded duration-aware repetition. The second is lexico-prosodic unitization and chunking, which preserves event identity and magnitude in both modalities by pooling only consecutive word units. The third is text-anchored paralinguistic fusion, which integrates local and utterance-level speech features by using NormGate to normalize and dynamically scale them relative to text. We evaluate LAPE on ADReSS and ADReSSo using participant-level cross-validation and leave-one-subject-out evaluation. LAPE achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four primary settings. Code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Do LLMs Need Architectural Changes for Simultaneous Speech Translation? A Prefix-to-Prefix Data Driven Approach

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) requires incremental translation under strict latency constraints, yet remains challenging for decoder-only LLM systems due to limited context and cross-lingual reordering. Recent approaches often introduce architectural changes or explicit read/write policies to control output timing, which can be brittle in conversational speech where segmentation boundaries are ambiguous. We present a simple data-driven alternative: fixed-length chunks for cumulative streaming decoding with a rewind-based committed prefix, and teacher-labeled prefix-to-prefix (P2P) targets with bounded waiting for fine-tuning, yielding CSSEL-P2P, where CSSEL is our proposed chunked streaming speech encoder LLM. In our in-house conversational speech evaluation, CSSEL-P2P improves streaming quality by +1.54 COMETKiwi over the CSSEL streaming baseline at comparable latency (+0.15s Average Lagging), suggesting effective SimulST without architectural changes via P2P supervision.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Compress the Cache, Not the Speech Embedding: KV Compression for Efficient Speech LLMs

Speech large language models (Speech LLMs) typically encode speech into sequences far longer than text, creating a major efficiency bottleneck during autoregressive decoding. A common remedy is to compress the speech sequence at the adapter level to remove temporal redundancy before it enters the LLM; however, such early downsampling risks discarding fine-grained information that cannot be recovered. We propose SpeechKV, which applies a learned pooling to the KV cache of speech tokens inside the LLM. This design allows the LLM to fuse speech and text internally while directly accelerating decoding. Trained on 71K hours of speech data, SpeechKV compresses the speech to approximately text-level granularity yet maintains performance on par with or even slightly better than the uncompressed baseline, with relative gains of 6.6% on out-of-domain entity recognition and 2.3% on OpenASR, while delivering at least 1.49 times decoding speedup that scales with audio length.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Speech-LLM Integration for ASR: Effective Joint Speech-Text Training by Interleaving

Speech-LLM integration has shown promising results by leveraging extensive textual pretraining, yet its specific benefits for automatic speech recognition (ASR) remain unclear. We observe that as supervised ASR training data increases, the contribution of LLM priors becomes less evident, and simple speech-text joint training under-utilizes textual knowledge. We therefore propose Joint Speech-Text Interleaved Pretraining (JSTIP), an ASR-oriented pretraining strategy that constructs word-level and segment-level interleaved speech-text sequences within aligned pairs for speech-LLM architectures that accept continuous inputs. Experiments on 38k hours of ASR data show consistent entity accuracy improvement compared to ASR-only and joint speech-text training baselines. JSTIP achieves on-par entity recognition performance using domain transcription text compared to synthetic speech-text pairs, simplifying domain adaptation. Benefiting from textual pretraining and domain text data, JSTIP is competitive with open-source ASR and Speech-LLM systems in medical entity recognition. The zero-shot speech question answering behaviors further suggest that interleaving reduces the speech-text modality gap and preserves the LLM generative prior, which is likely the reason for the entity improvements on the ASR task.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Gated Multi-Graph Fusion via Graph Attention Networks for Alzheimer's Disease Detection

Spontaneous speech is a vital non-invasive biomarker for Alzheimer's Disease (AD), yet many systems overlook non-linear structural disruptions and clinical heterogeneity in pathological language. We propose a Multi-View Gated Graph Attention Network that transcribes audio via Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to construct semantic, dependency, and co-occurrence graphs, characterizing speech through a "content-structure-flow" framework. Notably, the co-occurrence graph leverages Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) from a normative corpus to quantify narrative logic and linguistic deviation. To address symptomatic diversity, an adaptive gated fusion mechanism dynamically integrates these views. Evaluated on the ADReSSo dataset, our model achieves 90.00% accuracy. Ablation results confirm that the PMI-based graph and heterogeneity-aware gating are essential for robust classification across diverse clinical populations. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/opeacc/AD.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Preserving Speech-to-Text LLM Capabilities in Speech-to-Speech Generation

Strong speech-to-text (S2T) LLMs already provide robust speech perception and text reasoning, but adding speech-to-speech (S2S) output is challenging: fine-tuning the backbone can degrade the original S2T performance, while attaching a downstream talker reintroduces a serial text-to-speech bottleneck. We present PRIME-Speech, a frozen-backbone S2S conversion framework that trains only speech-generation modules. PRIME-Speech synchronizes a causal audio post-decoder with intermediate hidden states of the frozen backbone, so codec tokens are generated from the model's evolving reasoning trajectory rather than from completed text chunks. The post-decoder uses mixed hidden-state, text, and audio-history conditioning, and a training-time packing strategy with turn-level audio KV-cache and position reset stabilizes multi-turn spoken interaction without additional multi-turn S2S training data. Multi-token prediction further reduces the effective codec prediction rate and improves first-audio latency without modifying the reasoning path. Across speech translation, spoken QA, speech understanding, and multi-turn dialogue, PRIME-Speech preserves the S2T behavior of the frozen backbone while producing accurate, low-WER spoken responses.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Is Text All You Need? Text as a Universal Information Bottleneck for Speech LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) provide a powerful reasoning backbone for speech understanding, but integrating continuous acoustic signals into a frozen LLM remains challenging. Existing speech-to-LLM interfaces typically operate at two extremes: either enforcing near-discrete token alignment, which benefits transcription but loses paralinguistic information, or learning unconstrained continuous representations, which can drift away from the LLM's input space and degrade autoregressive decoding. In this work, we propose Convex Gate (C-Gate), a speech-to-LLM bridge that constrains all speech representations to lie within the LLM's input embedding manifold with an architectural convex-hull constraint. Concretely, each frame is represented as a convex combination of token embeddings, ensuring compatibility with the pretrained LLM while preserving continuous expressivity. Across automatic speech recognition (ASR) and emotion recognition, C-Gate achieves strong joint performance, improving LibriSpeech WER by up to 48.7% relative while matching or exceeding single-task emotion accuracy. Beyond performance, our analysis reveals a key insight: information is not carried by discrete token identities, but by time-resolved trajectories in the embedding space. Causal interventions confirm that both the trajectory structure and alignment to the pretrained embedding manifold are critical for performance. These results suggest that geometry, rather than token discreteness, is the fundamental design factor in speech-to-LLM interfaces, and provide a controlled regime for studying multimodal integration in frozen LLMs. We release the checkpoint, per-sample outputs, mechanism dumps, and intervention suite for replication.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

LLM can Read Spectrogram: Encoder-free Speech-Language Modeling

Recent speech-aware large language models (Speech-LLMs) rely on pre-trained speech encoders to convert audio into semantic/acoustic rich representations consumable by LLM. In this work, instead, we explore: can an LLM learn to read Mel spectrogram directly without a dedicated speech encoder? We propose Mel-LLM, an encoder-free Speech-LLM that feeds lightly pre-processed Mel-spectrogram patches directly into the LLM through a linear projection, allowing the LLM to learn speech-text alignment purely through its own parameters. We focus on speech understanding tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR), spoken QA and audio understanding. For ASR, we evaluate on the OpenASR Leaderboard public sets and production-level scaling experiments, demonstrating that the encoder-free solution achieves competitive performance with only limited degradation compared to encoder-initialized counterparts. We find that when data is limited, initialization from a multimodal checkpoint (Phi-4-MM) is crucial for maintaining performance. We also present ablation studies suggesting which LLM layers are most involved in speech adaptation. Beyond ASR, we extend Mel-LLM with general speech/audio understanding tasks, revealing an acoustic-semantic trade-off: directly exposing the LLM to Mel-spectrogram input improves paralinguistic and non-ASR acoustic tasks, while knowledge-intensive spoken QA remains more challenging than encoder-anchored systems. We additionally include a text-to-speech (TTS) proof-of-concept with a next-token VAE decoder, showing that direct Mel generation is possible but still trails stronger latent-diffusion generation.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Reasoning Matters: Mitigate Hallucination in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models via Reasoning-Conditioned Preference Optimization

Multimodal Large Reasoning Models introduce the reasoning paradigm, demonstrating strong capabilities on complex vision-language tasks. However, they still suffer from severe hallucinations. Existing training-based methods typically mitigate hallucinations through response-level direct preference optimization (DPO), where the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and the final answer are treated as a monolithic output and optimized jointly. We reveal that this formulation performs similarly to answer-only optimization, suggesting that it primarily learns answer-level preference, while leaving CoT-level supervision insufficiently exploited. To address this issue, we explicitly formulate a CoT-oriented preference term and derive Reasoning-Conditioned Direct Preference Optimization (RC-DPO), which models the CoT as a condition for answer generation and contrasts the preference for the same preferred answer under different CoT conditions, promoting answer-supportive reasoning chain alignment. To further improve optimization, we introduce a reasoning-enhanced preference data generation strategy that employs Monte Carlo Tree Search to discover visually grounded and logically consistent CoTs as positive samples, and attention-guided CoT token pruning to construct negative ones. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks show that RC-DPO effectively mitigates hallucinations and improves the reliability of the multimodal reasoning process.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

UNIQUE: Universal Top-k Sparse Attention for Training-free Inference and Sparsity-aware Training

Long-context inference in large language models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the linear growth of the self-attention key-value (KV) cache. Top-k sparse attention alleviates this by loading only a small fraction of the KV cache, but accurately and cheaply estimating cache importance, for both training-free use and sparsity-aware training, remains challenging. This paper proposes UNIQUE, a universal top-k sparse attention framework that addresses both requirements and stays consistently effective across LLM modalities. UNIQUE operates at the granularity of KV pages and estimates per-page importance with a simple yet accurate score combining the mean of the page's keys as a representative vector with their standard deviation as an offset term. To further close the train-inference gap, this paper introduces a soft-mask sparsity-aware training scheme that uses the top-k score boundary as a per-query threshold and a sigmoid soft mask around it, requiring neither auxiliary losses nor architectural changes. Experiments on text and speech LLMs show that UNIQUE preserves task performance on long-context benchmarks such as LongBench Pro and on long-form speech recognition, while delivering up to 11.4x attention-kernel speedup over FlashInfer dense attention and at least 5.3x end-to-end decoding speedup over a vLLM-based dense model.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Speech LLMs are Contextual Reasoning Transcribers

Despite extensions to speech inputs, effectively leveraging the rich knowledge and contextual understanding of large language models (LLMs) in automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains non-trivial, as the task primarily involves direct speech-to-text mapping. To address this, this paper proposes chain-of-thought ASR (CoT-ASR), which constructs a reasoning chain that enables LLMs to first analyze the input speech and generate contextual analysis, thereby fully exploiting their generative capabilities. With this contextual reasoning, CoT-ASR then performs more informed speech recognition and completes both reasoning and transcription in a single pass. Moreover, CoT-ASR naturally supports user-guided transcription: while designed to self-generate reasoning, it can also seamlessly incorporate user-provided context to guide transcription, further extending ASR functionality. To reduce the modality gap, this paper introduces a CTC-guided Modality Adapter, which uses CTC non-blank token probabilities to weight LLM embeddings, efficiently aligning speech encoder outputs with the LLM's textual latent space. Experiments show that, compared to standard LLM-based ASR, CoT-ASR achieves a relative reduction of 8.7% in word error rate (WER) and 16.9% in entity error rate (EER).

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Prior Knowledge-enhanced Spatio-temporal Epidemic Forecasting

Spatio-temporal epidemic forecasting is critical for public health management, yet existing methods often struggle with insensitivity to weak epidemic signals, over-simplified spatial relations, and unstable parameter estimation. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatio-Temporal priOr-aware Epidemic Predictor (STOEP), a novel hybrid framework that integrates implicit spatio-temporal priors and explicit expert priors. STOEP consists of three key components: (1) Case-aware Adjacency Learning (CAL), which dynamically adjusts mobility-based regional dependencies using historical infection patterns; (2) Space-informed Parameter Estimating (SPE), which employs learnable spatial priors to amplify weak epidemic signals; and (3) Filter-based Mechanistic Forecasting (FMF), which uses an expert-guided adaptive thresholding strategy to regularize epidemic parameters. Extensive experiments on real-world COVID-19 and influenza datasets demonstrate that STOEP outperforms the best baseline by 11.1% in RMSE. The system has been deployed at a provincial CDC in China to facilitate downstream applications.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agents

Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) excel in understanding but often lack transparent reasoning. To address this "black-box" limitation, we organized the Audio Reasoning Challenge at Interspeech 2026, the first shared task dedicated to evaluating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) quality in the audio domain. The challenge introduced MMAR-Rubrics, a novel instance-level protocol assessing the factuality and logic of reasoning chains. Featured Single Model and Agent tracks, the competition attracting 156 teams from 18 countries and regions. Results show agent systems currently lead in reasoning quality, utilizing iterative tool orchestration and cross-modal analysis. Besides, single models are rapidly advancing via reinforcement learning and sophisticated data pipeline. We details the challenge design, methodology, and a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art systems, providing new insights for explainable audio intelligence.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Seeing Through the Chain: Mitigate Hallucination in Multimodal Reasoning Models via CoT Compression and Contrastive Preference Optimization

While multimodal reasoning models (MLRMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities, they remain prone to hallucinations, and effective solutions are still underexplored. In this paper, we experimentally analyze the hallucination cause and propose C3PO, a training-based mitigation framework comprising \textbf{C}hain-of-Thought \textbf{C}ompression and \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{P}reference \textbf{O}ptimization. Firstly, we identify that introducing reasoning mechanisms exacerbates models' reliance on language priors while overlooking visual inputs, which can produce CoTs with reduced visual cues but redundant text tokens. To this end, we propose to selectively filter redundant thinking tokens for a more compact and signal-efficient CoT representation that preserves task-relevant information while suppressing noise. In addition, we observe that the quality of the reasoning trace largely determines whether hallucination emerges in subsequent responses. To leverage this insight, we introduce a reasoning-enhanced preference tuning scheme that constructs training pairs using high-quality AI feedback. We further design a multimodal hallucination-inducing mechanism that elicits models' inherent hallucination patterns via carefully crafted inducers, yielding informative negative signals for contrastive correction. We provide theoretical justification for the effectiveness and demonstrate consistent hallucination reduction across diverse MLRMs and benchmarks.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

EmotionThinker: Prosody-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Explainable Speech Emotion Reasoning

Emotional information in speech plays a unique role in multimodal perception. However, current Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), similar to conventional speech emotion recognition (SER) systems, still treat emotion understanding as a simple classification problem. This provides limited interpretability of predictions, while leaving the LLMs' expressive and reasoning capabilities underutilized. In this work, we take the first step to reformulate SER as a deep reasoning problem through reinforcement learning (RL). We propose EmotionThinker, which is designed to generate accurate emotion predictions with interpretable explanations grounded in fine-grained acoustic cues. To achieve this, we first construct EmotionCoT-35K, an emotional reasoning dataset with Chain-of-Thought annotations and detailed captions. Second, we observe that current SpeechLLMs exhibit weak prosody perception, whereas prosodic cues constitute fundamental signals for interpreting emotions. To address this, we develop the prosody-enhanced foundation model EmotionThinker-Base, and demonstrate that prosody enhancement improves emotion understanding. Third, we introduce Group-Relative-Policy-Optimization with Progressive-Trust-aware-Reasoning-Reward (GRPO-PTR) for RL. Different from standard GRPO, which relies only on rule-based outcome rewards, GRPO-PTR progressively introduces reasoning reward, dynamically adjusts it with a trustworthiness weight reflecting the alignment between reasoning and outcome, and evaluates the overall reasoning quality with a reward model based on multi-dimensional criteria. EmotionThinker outperforms previous state-of-the-art evaluation models both in emotion accuracy and explanation quality, advancing SER toward interpretable multimodal reasoning. Project page: https://github.com/dingdongwang/EmotionThinker

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Prompting: Efficient and Robust Contextual Biasing for Speech LLMs via Logit-Space Integration (LOGIC)

The rapid emergence of new entities -- driven by cultural shifts, evolving trends, and personalized user data -- poses a significant challenge for existing Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs). While these models excel at general conversational tasks, their static training knowledge limits their ability to recognize domain-specific terms such as contact names, playlists, or technical jargon. Existing solutions primarily rely on prompting, which suffers from poor scalability: as the entity list grows, prompting encounters context window limitations, increased inference latency, and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon. An alternative approach, Generative Error Correction (GEC), attempts to rewrite transcripts via post-processing but frequently suffers from "over-correction", introducing hallucinations of entities that were never spoken. In this work, we introduce LOGIC (Logit-Space Integration for Contextual Biasing), an efficient and robust framework that operates directly in the decoding layer. Unlike prompting, LOGIC decouples context injection from input processing, ensuring constant-time complexity relative to prompt length. Extensive experiments using the Phi-4-MM model across 11 multilingual locales demonstrate that LOGIC achieves an average 9% relative reduction in Entity WER with a negligible 0.30% increase in False Alarm Rate.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

RLBR: Reinforcement Learning with Biasing Rewards for Contextual Speech Large Language Models

Speech large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in end-to-end speech understanding and recognition, yet they continue to struggle with accurately recognizing rare words and domain-specific terminology. This paper presents a novel fine-tuning method, Reinforcement Learning with Biasing Rewards (RLBR), which employs a specialized biasing words preferred reward to explicitly emphasize biasing words in the reward calculation. In addition, we introduce reference-aware mechanisms that extend the reinforcement learning algorithm with reference transcription to strengthen the potential trajectory exploration space. Experiments on the LibriSpeech corpus across various biasing list sizes demonstrate that RLBR delivers substantial performance improvements over a strong supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baseline and consistently outperforms several recently published methods. The proposed approach achieves excellent performance on the LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other sets, reaching Biasing Word Error Rates (BWERs) of 0.59% / 2.11%, 1.09% / 3.24%, and 1.36% / 4.04% for biasing list sizes of 100, 500, and 1000, respectively, without compromising the overall WERs.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Smooth Operator: Smooth Verifiable Reward Activates Spatial Reasoning Ability of Vision-Language Model

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face a critical bottleneck in achieving precise numerical prediction for 3D scene understanding. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, primarily based on relative ranking, often suffer from severe reward sparsity and gradient instability, failing to effectively exploit the verifiable signals provided by 3D physical constraints. Notably, in standard GRPO frameworks, relative normalization causes "near-miss" samples (characterized by small but non-zero errors) to suffer from advantage collapse. This leads to a severe data utilization bottleneck where valuable boundary samples are discarded during optimization. To address this, we introduce the Smooth Numerical Reward Activation (SNRA) operator and the Absolute-Preserving GRPO (AP-GRPO) framework. SNRA employs a dynamically parameterized Sigmoid function to transform raw feedback into a dense, continuous reward continuum. Concurrently, AP-GRPO integrates absolute scalar gradients to mitigate the numerical information loss inherent in conventional relative-ranking mechanisms. By leveraging this approach, we constructed Numerical3D-50k, a dataset comprising 50,000 verifiable 3D subtasks. Empirical results indicate that AP-GRPO achieves performance parity with large-scale supervised methods while maintaining higher data efficiency, effectively activating latent 3D reasoning in VLMs without requiring architectural modifications.

cs.CV↗