arXiv subjects

Xunlong Zou

Publications and source records attributed to Xunlong Zou.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SEA-SpeechBench: A Large-Scale Multitask Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across Southeast Asia

The rapid advancement of audio and multimodal large language models has unlocked transformative speech understanding capabilities, yet evaluation frameworks remain predominantly English-centric, leaving Southeast Asian (SEA) languages critically underrepresented. We introduce SEA-SpeechBench, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale multitask benchmark that evaluates speech understanding in 11 SEA languages through 97,194 samples across 99 evaluation sets and 597 hours of curated audio data. Our benchmark comprises 9 diverse tasks across 3 categories: speech processing (automatic speech recognition, speech translation, spoken question answering), paralinguistic analysis (emotion, gender, age, speaker recognition), and temporal understanding, a novel dimension featuring timestamped content queries and temporal localization within extended audio sequences up to 3 minutes. We implement multilingual prompting in both native SEA languages and English to reflect user interactions with audio-language models. Evaluation of leading open-source and proprietary systems reveals marked performance gaps. Across all models, performance remains underwhelming on temporal understanding, emotion recognition, and speech translation. Prompting in low-resource languages such as Burmese and Tamil lags behind English by up to 41 percentage points. Our findings expose critical model limitations and underscore the need for inclusive model development. The SEA-SpeechBench benchmark is available at https://zwenyu.github.io/SEA-SpeechBench/.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Classification: Towards Speech Emotion Reasoning with Multitask AudioLLMs

Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs) have achieved strong results in semantic tasks like speech recognition and translation, but remain limited in modeling paralinguistic cues such as emotion. Existing approaches often treat emotion understanding as a classification problem, offering little insight into the underlying rationale behind predictions. In this work, we explore emotion reasoning, a strategy that leverages the generative capabilities of AudioLLMs to enhance emotion recognition by producing semantically aligned, evidence-grounded explanations. To support this in multitask AudioLLMs, we introduce a unified framework combining reasoning-augmented data supervision, dual-encoder architecture, and task-alternating training. This approach enables AudioLLMs to effectively learn different tasks while incorporating emotional reasoning. Experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD show that our approach not only improves emotion prediction accuracy but also enhances the coherence and evidential grounding of the generated responses. Experiments on two out-of-domain datasets demonstrate the generalization capabilities of the resulting model.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Singlish Understanding: Bridging the Gap with Datasets and Multimodal Models

Singlish, a Creole language rooted in English, is a key focus in linguistic research within multilingual and multicultural contexts. However, its spoken form remains underexplored, limiting insights into its linguistic structure and applications. To address this gap, we standardize and annotate the largest spoken Singlish corpus, introducing the Multitask National Speech Corpus (MNSC). These datasets support diverse tasks, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Question Answering (SQA), Spoken Dialogue Summarization (SDS), and Paralinguistic Question Answering (PQA). We release standardized splits and a human-verified test set to facilitate further research. Additionally, we propose SingAudioLLM, a multi-task multimodal model leveraging multimodal large language models to handle these tasks concurrently. Experiments reveal our models adaptability to Singlish context, achieving state-of-the-art performance and outperforming prior models by 10-30% in comparison with other AudioLLMs and cascaded solutions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MERaLiON-TextLLM: Cross-Lingual Understanding of Large Language Models in Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Singlish

Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of languages. However, efficacy can differ greatly between different language families, especially for those with limited linguistic resources. This report presents MERaLiON-TextLLM, a series of open-source language models specifically tailored to improve understanding and generation in Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Singlish. The initial released model is built on Llama-3-8B-Base and refined through a meticulously crafted process of continued pre-training and weight merging. Our approach achieves performance improvements across benchmarks in these languages, exceeding the capabilities of the official Llama-3 models. We provide the model checkpoints as a resource to support further research and development in cross-lingual language understanding.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MERaLiON-AudioLLM: Bridging Audio and Language with Large Language Models

We introduce MERaLiON-AudioLLM (Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network), the first speech-text model tailored for Singapore's multilingual and multicultural landscape. Developed under the National Large Language Models Funding Initiative, Singapore, MERaLiON-AudioLLM integrates advanced speech and text processing to address the diverse linguistic nuances of local accents and dialects, enhancing accessibility and usability in complex, multilingual environments. Our results demonstrate improvements in both speech recognition and task-specific understanding, positioning MERaLiON-AudioLLM as a pioneering solution for region specific AI applications. We envision this release to set a precedent for future models designed to address localised linguistic and cultural contexts in a global framework.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MoWE-Audio: Multitask AudioLLMs with Mixture of Weak Encoders

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced natural language processing capabilities, facilitating the development of AudioLLMs that process and understand speech and audio inputs alongside text. Existing AudioLLMs typically combine a pre-trained audio encoder with a pre-trained LLM, which are subsequently finetuned on specific audio tasks. However, the pre-trained audio encoder has constrained capacity to capture features for new tasks and datasets. To address this, we propose to incorporate mixtures of `weak' encoders (MoWE) into the AudioLLM framework. MoWE supplements a base encoder with a pool of relatively light weight encoders, selectively activated based on the audio input to enhance feature extraction without significantly increasing model size. Our empirical results demonstrate that MoWE effectively improves multi-task performance, broadening the applicability of AudioLLMs to more diverse audio tasks.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models

We introduce AudioBench, a universal benchmark designed to evaluate Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs). It encompasses 8 distinct tasks and 26 datasets, among which, 7 are newly proposed datasets. The evaluation targets three main aspects: speech understanding, audio scene understanding, and voice understanding (paralinguistic). Despite recent advancements, there lacks a comprehensive benchmark for AudioLLMs on instruction following capabilities conditioned on audio signals. AudioBench addresses this gap by setting up datasets as well as desired evaluation metrics. Besides, we also evaluated the capabilities of five popular models and found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks. We outline the research outlook for AudioLLMs and anticipate that our open-sourced evaluation toolkit, data, and leaderboard will offer a robust testbed for future model developments.

cs.SD↗