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At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Disentangling Representation using Attributes-based Gaussian Estimation for Medical Sound Diagnosis

Deep learning has a powerful capability of feature extraction. However, the lack of fairness and interpretability in deep neural networks poses limitations to their adoption in the medical domain. This paper proposes a disentangled representation learning (DisenRL) framework, named the Attributes-based Gaussian Estimation for Disentangled Representation (AGEDR), which incorporates Attribute Mapping Embedding (AME) modules designed to map attributes into vectors and align them with a subset of the latent vectors in a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE). This part of the latent vector will be disentangled from the remaining latent vectors by minimizing mutual information. A classifier is then trained using the mean parameters of the latent vectors from the VAE. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AGEDR outperforms both conventional classification models and existing disentangled representation learning methods. The ablation experiments also indicate the disentangling capability and fairness of AGEDR. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhaoKe1024/DisentangledRepr.

cs.AI↗

Anchoring Speech with Semantics: A Multimodal Adapter Mechanism for Automatic Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Languages

Low-resource ASR remains difficult because scarce transcripts provide limited supervised evidence for target-side generation. To address this gap, we propose SAMA-ASR, a lightweight adapter mechanism that augments the decoder with semantic anchors from auxiliary translations and an acoustic anchor from speech; in principle, the mechanism can be applied to similar encoder--decoder multitask speech models. Through cross-modal adaptation, SAMA-ASR conditions decoder states on translation-derived semantic embeddings and a speech embedding, combining utterance-level meaning with speech-grounded evidence before token prediction. At evaluation time, these semantic anchors can be generated automatically by an upstream speech-to-text translator rather than supplied as oracle translations. Experiments on two 30-hour datasets covering the low-resource Sinitic varieties Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka show that SAMA-ASR improves over acoustic, prior prompt-based, and semantic-only translation-guided baselines and remains effective in practical automatic semantic-anchor settings; translator-capacity analyses show that useful semantic anchors can be produced by a compact ST model.

cs.CL↗

From Audio Deepfake Detection to AI-Generated Music Detection -- A Pathway and Overview

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies continue to evolve, their use in generating realistic, contextually appropriate content has expanded into various domains. Music, an art form and medium for entertainment deeply rooted in human culture, is seeing an increased involvement of AI into its production. However, the unregulated use of AI music generation (AIGM) tools raises concerns about potential negative impacts on the music industry, copyright, and artistic integrity, underscoring the importance of effective AIGM detection. This paper provides a systematic overview of existing AIGM detection methods. We first establish a four-level detection taxonomy: signal-level, feature-level, watermark, and semantic consistency, organising methods according to the type of trace they exploit. Drawing on the more mature field of audio deepfake detection, we then present a stratified transferability analysis that examines which components may or may not transfer to AIGM detection, and under what conditions. A multi-dimensional classification further organises representative methods along input modality, detection granularity, feature type, model type, detection target, robustness setting, and interpretability. We conclude by discussing implications and proposing directions for future research to address ongoing challenges in the field.

cs.SD↗

MLAAD: The Multi-Language Audio Anti-Spoofing Dataset

This paper presents the Multi-Language Audio Anti-Spoofing Dataset (MLAAD), version 11: a dataset of synthetic audio to train and evaluate audio deepfake detection models. It features 205 Text-to-Speech (TTS) models, comprising a total of 1153.6 hours of synthetic voice in 54 different languages. To evaluate this dataset, we train three state-of-the-art deepfake detection models with MLAAD and observe that it demonstrates superior performance to comparable datasets like InTheWild and FakeOrReal when used as a training resource. Moreover, compared to the renowned ASVspoof 2019 dataset, MLAAD proves to be a complementary resource. In tests across eight datasets, MLAAD and ASVspoof 2019 alternately outperformed each other, each excelling on four datasets. By publishing the dataset and making a trained model accessible via an interactive webserver, we aim to democratize anti-spoofing technology, making it accessible beyond the realm of specialists, and contributing to global efforts against audio spoofing and deepfakes.

cs.SD↗

Rethinking Speaker Embeddings for Speech Generation: Sub-Center Modeling for Capturing Intra-Speaker Diversity

Modeling speech variation is key to natural, expressive generation. Speaker embeddings are commonly used to condition personalized speech systems, but they are typically trained for speaker recognition, where intra-speaker variability is suppressed and inter-speaker separation is maximized. This objective leads to overly compact representations that may discard variations crucial for generation. We revisit this design choice and propose a sub-center modeling framework for speaker embeddings. Instead of a single prototype per speaker, we learn multiple sub-centers during discriminative training, allowing utterances to align with different prototypes. This strategy preserves structured intra-speaker variability while maintaining discriminability. In zero-shot voice conversion, our method improves intelligibility, increases pitch variability, achieves higher naturalness ratings, and retains strong speaker verification performance.

eess.AS↗

DiffAnon: Diffusion-based Prosody Control for Voice Anonymization

To preserve or not to preserve prosody is a central question in voice anonymization. Prosody conveys meaning and affect, yet is tightly coupled with speaker identity. Existing methods either discard prosody for privacy or lack a principled mechanism to control the utility-privacy trade-off, operating at fixed design points. We propose DiffAnon, a diffusion-based anonymization method with classifier-free guidance (CFG) that provides explicit, continuous inference-time control over prosody preservation. DiffAnon refines acoustic detail over semantic embeddings of an RVQ codec, enabling smooth interpolation between anonymization strength and prosodic fidelity within a single model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first voice anonymization framework to provide structured, interpolatable inference-time prosody control. Experiments demonstrate structured trade-off behavior, achieving strong utility while maintaining competitive privacy across controllable operating points.

eess.AS↗

Multi-Faceted Interactivity Alignment in Full-Duplex Speech Models

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models can listen and speak simultaneously, making them a promising architecture for natural conversation. However, current models are trained solely with supervised learning through token-level likelihood maximization, which does not directly optimize interaction-level behaviors, causing interactivity issues such as excessive silence and ill-timed turn-taking. Recent work has applied reinforcement learning (RL) to improve interactivity, but existing methods address only a limited set of interactive behaviors in their rewards. In this work, we propose a post-training alignment method that comprehensively improves the interactivity of full-duplex spoken dialogue models through RL. We address the four canonical axes of interactivity: pause handling, turn-taking, backchanneling, and user interruption. For each axis, we extract short audio segments from human conversation corpora and optimize the model with axis-specific reward functions. An extra LLM-based reward for response quality prevents semantic degradation. We apply our method to two open-source models, Moshi and PersonaPlex, demonstrating consistent improvements in interactivity on both offline evaluation with pre-recorded audio and real-time multi-turn dialogue evaluation.

cs.CL↗

Is Prosody Lost in Translation? Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Prosody Similarity Across Languages

Prosody plays an important role in speech translation, conveying information such as emphasis, emotion, and intent beyond lexical content. However, despite recent progress in expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), little is known about how prosodic patterns are similar/different across languages. Understanding these cross-lingual similarities and differences is crucial for effectively incorporating prosody into expressive S2ST systems. In this work, we present the first fine-grained cross-lingual analysis of prosody using multilingual dubbing data across English-German, English-Spanish, and English-French language pairs. We analyze the similarity of pitch, energy, and temporal feature patterns between source and target speech and investigate the linguistic and alignment-related factors affecting this similarity. Our analysis reveals inherent cross-lingual correlations in prosodic structure between certain languages. The findings provide important insights into the transferability of prosody across languages and offer empirical guidance for future expressive speech-to-speech translation systems.

cs.SD↗

Exploring the Design Space of Representation Learning for Audio Transformations

Neural audio representation learning has enabled a range of content-oriented applications, but the resulting features remain limited for tasks involving audio processing. Furthermore, it is not obvious what processing-aware representations should capture: the processing itself, abstracted away from source content, or the processed audio that retains it. Existing approaches implicitly commit to one or the other and also differ in their models, data, and evaluation, obscuring which design choices drive their behavior. We address both questions within a unified framework of three objectives: processing consistency, description alignment, and equivariance via forward prediction. We compare all combinations of the objectives under a controlled setup and reveal their relative strengths and interactions. Our framework produces both a transformation embedding and a processed-audio embedding, and we find that the two play complementary roles: distance-based tasks favor the former, while probe-based tasks favor the latter. Combined with improvements in network architecture and training pipeline, our representations outperform prior baselines across retrieval, probe-based evaluation, and style transfer.

cs.SD↗

Multirate State Space Models for End-to-End Processing of Pulse Density Modulated Speech Signals

Deep neural networks (DNNs) based on state-space models (SSMs) are increasingly applied to speech processing, but typically operate on pulse-code-modulated (PCM) audio. This constrains deployment on low-power, always-on edge devices, which commonly use single-bit pulse-density-modulated (PDM) micro-electromechanical (MEMS) microphones for their noise robustness, low cost, and variable sampling rates that enable low-power operation. In fact, converting PDM to PCM requires low-pass filtering and decimation, imposing costly overhead on resource-constrained hardware. While prior works have attempted to process PDM signals directly, they require long training times and generalize poorly across sampling rates. In this paper, we show that the SSM has two key properties that remediate these issues: its continuous-time parametrization allows it to produce a consistent representation of the input audio signal, regardless of the modulation strategy and sampling rate, and its long-term memory enables this representation to be aggressively downsampled without needing any anti-aliasing operations. We then propose a novel end-to-end PDM speech processing architecture that uses an SSM to encode the input audio signal into a modulation- and sampling-rate-invariant latent representation. We show that our proposed architecture achieves robust speech classification and enhancement gains at low-power sampling-rates (512 kHz) and similar performance to state-of-the-art algorithms operating on PCM data when tested on standard PDM sampling-rates of 2 MHz. Moreover, we show that the SSM's output can be downsampled by more than 65,000 times, thus significantly reducing the number of processing timesteps in downstream layers.

cs.SD↗

Low-Power End-to-End Cochlear Implant Speech Denoising with Spiking Neural Networks

Cochlear implants (CI) restore hearing for individuals with severe to profound hearing loss. However, CI users often struggle to understand speech in noisy environments. Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown promise in enhancing speech for CI users, yet their high energy demands make them non-ideal for low-power CI processors. Spiking neural networks (SNN), on the other hand, offer comparable performance with significantly lower energy consumption. Hence, we propose a novel SNN inspired by the Deep ACE architecture that simultaneously performs speech enhancement and CI coding. Our model achieves competitive vocoded short-time objective intelligibility (VSTOI) and signal-to-noise ratio improvement (SNRi) scores compared to Deep ACE, while achieving more than a sixfold reduction in energy consumption.

cs.SD↗

Accurate Plate Reverb Parameter Estimation Using Two-Stage Evolutionary Search

We describe our submission to Task A of the 1st DAFx parameter estimation challenge. The task is to recover the six physical parameters of a simulated metal-plate reverberator -- its dimensions and material properties -- from a single impulse response (IR). We treat this as a black-box optimization: candidate parameter sets are fed to the simulator and scored by a loss against the target IR. The method has two stages. The first uses CMA-ES, an evolutionary optimizer, to recover five of the six parameters, comparing IRs under an amplitude-normalized loss. Amplitude normalization makes the search robust but discards the cue to the sixth parameter, the plate's surface density; a second stage therefore estimates it alone, with a ternary search on the un-normalized loss. As the choice of loss strongly affects the search, we select it beforehand, and analyze why compression in the common multi-scale spectral loss degrades recovery. Finally, we test our method on a validation set of 50 IRs, discuss a pathological failure mode, and ablate to justify having two different stages instead of a unified CMA-ES search.

eess.AS↗

Automatic Pronunciation Error Detection and Correction of the Holy Quran's Learners Using Deep Learning

Assessing spoken language is challenging, and quantifying pronunciation metrics for machine learning models is even harder. However, for the Holy Quran, this task is enabled by the rigorous recitation rules (Tajweed) established through the efforts of Muslim scholars, making highly effective assessment possible. Despite this advantage, the scarcity of high-quality annotated data remains a significant barrier. In this work, we bridge these gaps by introducing: (1) A 98% automated pipeline to produce high-quality Quranic datasets -- encompassing collection of recitations from expert reciters, segmentation at pause points (waqf) using our fine-tuned wav2vec2-BERT model, transcription of segments, and transcript verification via our novel Tasmeea algorithm; (2) 848 hours of audio (286K annotated utterances); (3) qdat_bench, a benchmark covering phonemes, diacritization, and Tajweed rules (Ghunnah, Qalqalah, Madd) on real recitation errors containing 159 samples; (4) A novel ASR-based approach for pronunciation error detection utilizing our custom Quran Phonetic Script (QPS) to encode Tajweed rules (unlike the IPA standard for Modern Standard Arabic). QPS uses an 11-level script: phoneme level (encoding Arabic letters with short/long vowels) and sifat level (encoding articulation characteristics of every phoneme). We further present comprehensive modeling with our novel multi-level CTC model, which achieved 0.21% and 1.94% average Phoneme Error Rate (PER) on the test set and qdat_bench respectively, with a 75.8% Tajweed F1 score. We release our work as open-source: https://obadx.github.io/quran-muaalem/en/

eess.AS↗

A Mixed-Behavior Vote Model for Multimedia Subjective Quality Votes, Means, and Variances

The relationship between subjective test vote variance and vote mean (or MOS) is well-studied, and the mathematically admissible vote variance region has been previously defined. We propose a reduced admissible variance region called the Unimodal Variance Region (UVR) that better describes real subjective rating behavior of multimedia. Further, subjective vote variance is often modeled as parabolic. We explain that, in practice, the parabolic model often violates the admissible region in the variance vs. MOS plane and we propose alternatives that respect the admissible region. We also present a parametrized random process to model votes that mixes voting processes and produces a realistic range of vote variances within the UVR at any desired MOS. This process was inspired by and comports with voting behavior that is observed in many subjective tests. By modeling vote variance from a subjective experiment, this vote model offers additional interpretable insights into voting behavior observed in a given experiment. We present example results from 16 datasets spanning speech, image, and video subjective quality experiments.

cs.MM↗

CAD: Conflict-Aware Decoding to Mitigate Cross-Modal Hallucinations in Omnimodal Large Language Models

Omnimodal large language models (Omni-LLMs) integrate audio, video, and text, yet remain vulnerable to cross-modal hallucinations, where one modality improperly influences predictions about another. Existing training-free decoders modulate modality influence through perturbation or relevance weighting, but do not assess predictive compatibility within the joint audio-visual branch. Because joint-branch discrepancies may indicate either harmful interference or useful complementarity, reliable intervention requires assessing both discrepancy magnitude and actionability. To this end, we propose Conflict-Aware Decoding (CAD), a training-free framework comprising Potential Conflict Magnitude Estimation (PCME) and Conflict Actionability Assessment (CAA). PCME quantifies potential conflict using audio-video disagreement and the deviation of the joint prediction from a relevance-weighted unimodal reference. CAA then applies Dempster-Shafer reliability discounting to task-space answer relations, using query relevance and answer decisiveness to determine whether intervention is warranted. When an actionable conflict is identified, CAD selectively reallocates decoding weight from the joint branch to the unimodal branches. Experiments on CMM, AVHBench, WorldSense, and VideoMME show that CAD consistently outperforms the base decoder and competitive training-free methods across multiple audio-visual backbones. On Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, CAD improves overall accuracy by 14.1 and 8.0 percentage points on CMM and AVHBench, respectively, without model retraining.

eess.AS↗

Grounded Decoding for Autoregressive Speech Enhancement via Adaptive Code-Space Grounding and Local LLM Refinement

Large language model (LLM)-based autoregressive speech enhancement (SE) produces natural speech using learned clean-speech priors, but may hallucinate content unsupported by the input. Deterministic SE better preserves observation-coupled evidence, yet often retains residual noise or local distortion. We propose an evidence-grounded generative SE framework that uses a deterministic estimate as imperfect evidence. A Whisper-guided DPRNN produces an enhanced waveform, which is blended with the observation and tokenized into a discrete evidence sequence. The evidence conditions an autoregressive clean-speech token generator and is reused during decoding through Code-Space Grounding (CSG), which penalizes candidates according to their Hamming distance in the factorized finite-scalar-quantized (FSQ) space. Because the appropriate grounding strength depends on acoustic difficulty, we introduce SNR-Conditioned CSG (SNR-CSG), which maps a calibrated residual-SNR estimate to an utterance-level strength and constructs an adaptive grounded anchor. Although grounding improves content fidelity, the anchor may retain local acoustic defects inherited from the evidence. Since such defects are predominantly local in the FSQ space, nearby tokens may provide better acoustic realizations without large departures from the observation-supported trajectory. We therefore propose Grounded Neighborhood Refinement with LLM ranking (GNR-LLM). It performs one additional teacher-forced pass conditioned on the grounded-anchor history, intersects the LLM top-$K$ candidates with a local FSQ Hamming neighborhood. Experiments on in-domain, controlled-SNR, and DNS no-reverb conditions show that SNR-CSG provides robust automatic grounding, while GNR-LLM substantially improves low-SNR perceptual quality without sacrificing content fidelity.

cs.SD↗

Training-Free Speech-Centric Omni Understanding with Frozen VLMs

Audio-visual understanding remains challenging because models must jointly interpret spoken content, visual events, and their temporal relationships. Existing omni models typically introduce dedicated audio encoders and rely on expensive audio-video-text training, tightly coupling omni capability to specific VLM backbones and potentially weakening their existing visual and reasoning abilities. This raises three questions: whether native omni training is necessary for every new VLM, whether speech-centric omni capability can be added while preserving the original backbone, and where richer acoustic representations remain essential. We introduce Training-Free Omni (TFO), a plug-and-play framework that converts a frozen VLM into a speech-centric omni model without architectural modification, or multimodal re-alignment. TFO uses Whisper to extract confidence-filtered, timestamped transcripts and routes them through the VLM's existing language interface, while leaving its visual pathway unchanged. Across matched comparisons with native omni models on 56 benchmarks and 21 languages, TFO is competitive on audio-visual understanding, improves average audio-only performance across all five model settings, and achieves substantial multilingual speech gains. Freezing the VLM also generally preserves stronger image/video understanding, visual grounding, coding, mathematical reasoning, and medical question answering than the corresponding native omni checkpoints. These results show that strong speech-centric omni understanding can often be obtained through modular audio-to-language routing rather than costly backbone-specific training.

eess.AS↗

TurnFSM for Full-Duplex Dialogue System: Internalizing State-Machine Logic for Streaming Semantic Voice Activity Detection and Utterance-Level Rejection

Full-duplex voice assistants must continuously listen while speaking, handling user interruptions under low-latency and resource-constrained streaming conditions. Existing end-to-end full-duplex models can compromise reasoning-related capabilities after speech-domain adaptation, whereas cascaded pipelines introduce extra inference overhead and handcrafted control logic. We propose TurnFSM, an LLM-based state prediction framework that internalizes turn control as explicit finite-state transitions, unifying streaming semantic VAD and utterance-level rejection. TurnFSM decomposes submission and rejection into a serial decision process, reducing multi-task interference while maintaining performance comparable to single-task models. We further introduce a first-order state transition mechanism that enforces the dependency on only the previous state during training, enabling compact inference with the standard causal mask and original LLM positional encoding while avoiding historical state-token accumulation and unnecessary step-by-step state generation. Experimental results show that TurnFSM consistently outperforms the binary-head baseline and remains competitive with task-specific models.

eess.AS↗