arXiv Computation and Language

Too Emotional to Be Fake? Intra-Utterance Emotion Shifts Expose Failure Modes in Speech Deepfake Detectors

arXiv AI
Aug 26

EmoTra-TTS: Smooth Intra-Utterance Emotion Transitions for Speech Synthesis

EmoTra‑TTS introduces a method for smooth intra‑utterance emotion transitions in speech synthesis. It uses a multi‑pass flow blending pipeline, dual‑stage VAD conditioning, and direction‑magnitude decoupled injection to generate frame‑aligned emotional prosody. The system adds only 0.43% more parameters, incurs no latency, and outperforms four state‑of‑the‑art baselines and two commercial systems in emotion transition quality and overall preference tests.

By Tianchi Liu, Zeyang Song, Tianrui Wang, Zhipeng Li, Chenglin Xu, Yiwen Guo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Enriching Speech Emotion Representations with Conversational Context

The paper introduces ACERT, a module that incorporates a flexible-length window of conversational context to enhance Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). By capturing emotional evolution across utterances, ACERT outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on IEMOCAP, sets a new context‑aware benchmark on SAFE, and achieves strong results on MELD. Ablation studies attribute ACERT’s improvements to emotional and conversational continuity rather than speaker identity or acoustic conditions.

By Arthur Peuvot, Romaric Besan\c{c}on, Ga\"el de Chalendar, Bianca Vieru, Ioana Vasilescu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Reading Emotions in the Token Space: Discriminative Adaptation of SpeechLLMs for Emotion Recognition

The paper introduces a discriminative adaptation for SpeechLLMs that reads the hidden state of the final prompt token via a simple classification head, enabling emotion recognition in a single forward pass without altering the backbone. This approach replaces the generative decoder, which can produce out‑of‑set labels and favor frequent classes, with a controlled comparison between generative and discriminative inference. Experiments on IEMOCAP show improved Macro F1 scores, elimination of hallucinations, and larger gains on realistic ASR transcripts, while revealing that emotion directions encode indirect associations reflecting web‑scale text biases.

By Hasindri Watawana, Sergio Burdisso, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Manjunath K E, Kadri Hacioglu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke