arXiv subjects

Solange Rossato

Publications and source records attributed to Solange Rossato.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

OAA: Three Phases of Vocal Guidance in Human-Drone Teleoperation

Voice-guided teleoperation requires systems that adapt to the evolving dynamics of human guidance. Yet most voice-controlled robot systems treat spoken commands as a stationary stream, ignoring how the guide's communicative behavior changes as the task progresses. Using motion capture and speech data from two experimental configurations, humanhuman guidance (finger pointing, N =10 dyads) and humandrone teleoperation (gamepad control, N =29 dyads), we show that spontaneous vocal guidance consistently organizes into three kinematically and linguistically distinct phases: Orientation, Approach, and Adjustment. These phases are identified automatically via change point detection on 3D trajectory signals, and validated statistically (Kruskal-Wallis, p<.001). Three lexical families replicate across configurations: rotation vocabulary marks Orientation, translation vocabulary is scarce there, and attenuators accumulate toward Adjustment. Together with inter-utterance silence, these cues mark the Orientation boundary that speech rate alone leaves unmarked. The same three-phase structure emerges in both configurations despite radically different motor interfaces, suggesting it is an intrinsic property of human spatial guidance rather than an artifact of the experimental setup. We discuss implications for OAA-aware adaptive control in voice-guided teleoperation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

End-to-End Voice Intent Recognition for Spontaneous Human-Drone Interaction with Naive Users

Voice control offers an intuitive alternative to manual drone piloting, yet most existing systems rely on rigid command vocabularies that fail to handle the spontaneous, disfluent speech of naive users. This paper addresses this gap by proposing an End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding architecture for real-time human-drone interaction in French. Our model combines a frozen Self-Supervised Learning acoustic encoder with a lightweight LSTM-based classification head, augmented by a cross-modal knowledge distillation objective that aligns acoustic representations with semantic embeddings from a text teacher, without requiring transcription at inference time. We evaluate our approach on VoiceStick, a novel French corpus of spontaneous speech collected during real teleoperation sessions with 29 nonexpert dyads. On simple voice commands, our best configuration achieves 93% accuracy at 7 ms inference latency, outperforming cascade baselines (79%, 202 ms) with a 29x speedup. On the full spontaneous speech test set, our architecture reaches 82% accuracy, with crossmodal distillation consistently improving robustness across all configurations. These results demonstrate that End-to-End architectures are not only feasible but preferable for spontaneous voice-guided UAV teleoperation, combining semantic robustness, low latency, and calibrated confidence.

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arXiv2026

Responsible Benchmarking of Fairness for Automatic Speech Recognition

Many studies have shown automatic speech processing (ASR) systems have unequal performance across speakergroups (SG's). However, the manner in which such studies arrive at this conclusion is inconsistent. To pave the wayfor more reliable results in future studies, we lay out best practices for benchmarking ASR fairness based on literaturefrom machine learning fairness, social sciences, and speech science. We first describe the importance of preciselythe fairness hypothesis being interrogated, and tailoring fairness metrics to apply specifically to said hypothesis.We then examine several benchmarks used to rate ASR systems on fairness and discuss how their results can bemisconstrued without assiduous oversight into the intersections between SG's. We find that evaluating fairnessbased on single heterogeneous SG's, such as they are defined in fairness benchmarks, can lead to misidentifyingwhich SG's are actually being mistreated by ASR systems. We advocate for as fine-grained an analysis as possibleof the intersectionality of as many demographic variables as are available in the metadata of fairness corpora in orderto tease out such spurious correlations

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Appraisal Dimensions Generalise Better than Emotion Labels for Cross-Age Affect Recognition in AI-Assisted Healthcare

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare has advanced significantly, yet affect recognition remains a major challenge, particularly in AI-assisted interventions such as Computerized Cognitive Training (CCT). The THERADIA-WoZ corpus was developed to enable multimodal affect recognition in the context of AI-driven CCT, focusing on an older adult population. This study extends the corpus by introducing a dataset collected from young adults, allowing direct comparison of affect recognition models across age groups. Our objective was to assess whether multimodal models based on dimensions borrowed from appraisal theories outperform those based on categorical labels and to evaluate their generalisation power across age corpora. After comparing both corpora, models were trained and tested using within-corpus, cross-corpus, and mixed-corpus evaluation. Results revealed that appraisal dimensions consistently outperformed categorical labels across all conditions, demonstrating greater predictive accuracy and stability. Notably, categorical labels failed to generalise across age corpora, as performance dropped to chance levels in cross-corpus evaluation. In contrast, appraisal dimensions maintained predictive performance above chance, reinforcing their robustness for cross-age affect recognition. Furthermore, training on both corpora did not improve generalisation beyond within-corpus training. The findings support the theoretical and practical advantages of appraisal dimensions over categorical labels in affective computing. They also highlight the importance of multimodal fusion and deep learning representations for emotion modeling. To facilitate future research, we provide an API for researchers interested in time-continuous emotion prediction, offering valuable tools for behavioral sciences to enhance the measurement of emotional states in various experimental settings.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Identifying and typifying demographic unfairness in phoneme-level embeddings of self-supervised speech recognition models

Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been observed to function better for certain speaker groups (SGs) than others, despite recent gains in overall performance. One potential impediment to progress towards fairer ASR is a more nuanced understanding of the types of modeling errors that speech encoder models make, and in particular the difference between the structure of embeddings for high-performance and low-performance SGs. This paper proposes a framework typifying two types of error that can occur in modeling phonemes in ASR systems: random error/high variance in phoneme embedding, vs systematic error/embedding bias. We find that training phoneme classification probes only on a single, typically disadvantaged SG, sometimes improves performance for that SG, which is evidence for the existence of SG-level bias in phoneme embeddings. On the other hand, we find that speakers and SGs with higher levels of phoneme variance are the same as those with worse phoneme prediction accuracy. We conclude that both types of error are present in phoneme embeddings and both are candidate causes for SG-level unfairness in ASR, though random error is likely a greater hindrance to fairness than systematic error. Furthermore, we find that finetuning encoder models using a fairness-enhancing algorithm (domain enhancing and adversarial training) changes neither the benefits of in-domain phoneme classification probe training, nor measured levels of random embedding error.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Where Do Self-Supervised Speech Models Become Unfair?

Speech encoder models are known to model members of some speaker groups (SGs) better than others. However, there has been little work in establishing why this occurs on a technological level. To our knowledge, we present the first layerwise fairness analysis of pretrained self-supervised speech encoder models (S3Ms), probing each embedding layer for speaker identification (SID) automatic speech recognition (ASR). We find S3Ms produce embeddings biased against certain SGs for both tasks, starting at the very first latent layers. Furthermore, we find opposite patterns of layerwise bias for SID vs ASR for all models in our study: SID bias is minimized in layers that minimize overall SID error; on the other hand, ASR bias is maximized in layers that minimize overall ASR error. The inverse bias/error relationship for ASR is unaffected when probing S3Ms that are finetuned for ASR, suggesting SG-level bias is established during pretraining and is difficult to remove.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Pantagruel: Unified Self-Supervised Encoders for French Text and Speech

We release Pantagruel models, a new family of self-supervised encoder models for French text and speech. Instead of predicting modality-tailored targets such as textual tokens or speech units, Pantagruel learns contextualized target representations in the feature space, allowing modality-specific encoders to capture linguistic and acoustic regularities more effectively. Separate models are pre-trained on large-scale French corpora, including Wikipedia, OSCAR and CroissantLLM for text, together with MultilingualLibriSpeech, LeBenchmark, and INA-100k for speech. INA-100k is a newly introduced 100,000-hour corpus of French audio derived from the archives of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), the national repository of French radio and television broadcasts, providing highly diverse audio data. We evaluate Pantagruel across a broad range of downstream tasks spanning both modalities, including those from the standard French benchmarks such as FLUE or LeBenchmark. Across these tasks, Pantagruel models show competitive or superior performance compared to strong French baselines such as CamemBERT, FlauBERT, and LeBenchmark2.0, while maintaining a shared architecture that can seamlessly handle either speech or text inputs. These results confirm the effectiveness of feature-space self-supervised objectives for French representation learning and highlight Pantagruel as a robust foundation for multimodal speech-text understanding.

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arXiv2024

THERADIA WoZ: An Ecological Corpus for Appraisal-based Affect Research in Healthcare

We present THERADIA WoZ, an ecological corpus designed for audiovisual research on affect in healthcare. Two groups of senior individuals, consisting of 52 healthy participants and 9 individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), performed Computerised Cognitive Training (CCT) exercises while receiving support from a virtual assistant, tele-operated by a human in the role of a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ). The audiovisual expressions produced by the participants were fully transcribed, and partially annotated based on dimensions derived from recent models of the appraisal theories, including novelty, intrinsic pleasantness, goal conduciveness, and coping. Additionally, the annotations included 23 affective labels drew from the literature of achievement affects. We present the protocols used for the data collection, transcription, and annotation, along with a detailed analysis of the annotated dimensions and labels. Baseline methods and results for their automatic prediction are also presented. The corpus aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers in affective computing, and is made available to both industry and academia.

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arXiv2023

LeBenchmark 2.0: a Standardized, Replicable and Enhanced Framework for Self-supervised Representations of French Speech

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is at the origin of unprecedented improvements in many different domains including computer vision and natural language processing. Speech processing drastically benefitted from SSL as most of the current domain-related tasks are now being approached with pre-trained models. This work introduces LeBenchmark 2.0 an open-source framework for assessing and building SSL-equipped French speech technologies. It includes documented, large-scale and heterogeneous corpora with up to 14,000 hours of heterogeneous speech, ten pre-trained SSL wav2vec 2.0 models containing from 26 million to one billion learnable parameters shared with the community, and an evaluation protocol made of six downstream tasks to complement existing benchmarks. LeBenchmark 2.0 also presents unique perspectives on pre-trained SSL models for speech with the investigation of frozen versus fine-tuned downstream models, task-agnostic versus task-specific pre-trained models as well as a discussion on the carbon footprint of large-scale model training. Overall, the newly introduced models trained on 14,000 hours of French speech outperform multilingual and previous LeBenchmark SSL models across the benchmark but also required up to four times more energy for pre-training.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

LeBenchmark: A Reproducible Framework for Assessing Self-Supervised Representation Learning from Speech

Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) using huge unlabeled data has been successfully explored for image and natural language processing. Recent works also investigated SSL from speech. They were notably successful to improve performance on downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). While these works suggest it is possible to reduce dependence on labeled data for building efficient speech systems, their evaluation was mostly made on ASR and using multiple and heterogeneous experimental settings (most of them for English). This questions the objective comparison of SSL approaches and the evaluation of their impact on building speech systems. In this paper, we propose LeBenchmark: a reproducible framework for assessing SSL from speech. It not only includes ASR (high and low resource) tasks but also spoken language understanding, speech translation and emotion recognition. We also focus on speech technologies in a language different than English: French. SSL models of different sizes are trained from carefully sourced and documented datasets. Experiments show that SSL is beneficial for most but not all tasks which confirms the need for exhaustive and reliable benchmarks to evaluate its real impact. LeBenchmark is shared with the scientific community for reproducible research in SSL from speech.

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arXiv2020

Gender Representation in Open Source Speech Resources

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing use of deep-learning architectures, the question of ethics, transparency and fairness of AI systems has become a central concern within the research community. We address transparency and fairness in spoken language systems by proposing a study about gender representation in speech resources available through the Open Speech and Language Resource platform. We show that finding gender information in open source corpora is not straightforward and that gender balance depends on other corpus characteristics (elicited/non elicited speech, low/high resource language, speech task targeted). The paper ends with recommendations about metadata and gender information for researchers in order to assure better transparency of the speech systems built using such corpora.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Gender Representation in French Broadcast Corpora and Its Impact on ASR Performance

This paper analyzes the gender representation in four major corpora of French broadcast. These corpora being widely used within the speech processing community, they are a primary material for training automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. As gender bias has been highlighted in numerous natural language processing (NLP) applications, we study the impact of the gender imbalance in TV and radio broadcast on the performance of an ASR system. This analysis shows that women are under-represented in our data in terms of speakers and speech turns. We introduce the notion of speaker role to refine our analysis and find that women are even fewer within the Anchor category corresponding to prominent speakers. The disparity of available data for both gender causes performance to decrease on women. However this global trend can be counterbalanced for speaker who are used to speak in the media when sufficient amount of data is available.

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