arXiv:2607. 08256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Best-of-$N$ (BoN) inference improves content consistency in zero-shot text-to-speech by selecting from $N$ candidates with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) verifier.
arXiv:2609.17548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Myovox, from myo (muscle) and vox (voice), decodes open-vocabulary English text from 31-channel surface electromyography (sEMG) recorded from the muscl...
arXiv:2609.15618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our team, VANGUARD, presents IROH (Insightful Ranking of Humor), a three-stage retrieval system for JOKER Task 1 English at CLEF 2026, achieving firs...
The paper introduces SITAR, a situational distortion metric for evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. SITAR aggregates situational severity and cumulative extent into a unified score using a bounded recursive formulation, and is implemented as a lightweight BERT-family regressor that requires minimal runtime cost. The authors validate SITAR through extrinsic and intrinsic protocols, showing it tracks capability scaling and provides diagnostic utility across diverse datasets and models.
arXiv:2610.27652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practitioners building training corpora with a pipeline of language models keep a preprocessing or refinement (post-process) stage when switching it...
The paper evaluates a multilingual ASR model (MMS‑1B‑all) on a Garrusi Kurdish dataset using a common‑reference staged normalization approach. By normalizing both reference and hypothesis, the authors show that raw Arabic‑script hypotheses yield a 111.70 % WER, which drops to 97.85 % after folding into a reduced orthography, highlighting the impact of orthographic differences on error measurement. A Southern Kurdish fine‑tuned system performs worse, and residual errors are partly due to scoring‑pipeline limitations rather than recognition failures.
The paper introduces Accent Analogy Guidance (AAG), a training‑free sampling technique that removes accent influence from synthetic voices in cross‑lingual zero‑shot text‑to‑speech. By subtracting an accent direction derived from the model’s own predictions, AAG improves speaker similarity while maintaining the same accent level. Experiments on four open TTS models show that AAG consistently outperforms reweighting methods, achieving higher speaker similarity scores across multiple test sets.
The study evaluates seven parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) methods—LoRA, QLoRA, AdaLoRA, DoRA, LoHA, VeRA, and VB‑LoRA—on two ASR back‑ends (Whisper‑large‑v3 and Qwen3‑ASR‑1.7B) for a single post‑stroke Hungarian male speaker with severe dysarthria. Attention‑projection adapters consistently lower character error rates (CER) on both models, with LoRA emerging as the simplest and most effective choice; QLoRA performs worse and offers no memory advantage at this scale. Full fine‑tuning yields the lowest CER, but a 115 MB LoRA that also adapts feed‑forward blocks achieves comparable accuracy with only 3.7 % of the per‑patient storage, and a 5‑minute enrollment audio captures nearly half of the zero‑shot‑to‑30‑minute CER improvement. whyItMatters":"The paper demonstrates that lightweight PEFT adapters can substantially improve dysarthric ASR performance while keeping storage and computational costs low, offering a practical path for personalized speech recognition in clinical settings."
IndicQE-APE is a consolidated benchmark that unifies quality estimation (QE) and automatic post‑editing (APE) data for nine Indic language pairs, comprising 126,754 instances with multiple aligned labels such as direct assessment, human post‑edit, word‑level OK/BAD tags, and error explanations. The dataset includes a stratified test set across four difficulty axes and supports training and evaluation of six prompted large language models, three COMET metrics, and three APE systems. Experiments reveal that segments with conflicting holistic and token‑level quality signals are consistently ranked lower, while annotator disagreement shows no effect when controlled for score distribution. whyItMatters":"The benchmark provides a unified resource for training and evaluating QE and APE across Indic languages, enabling consistent comparison of models and metrics on a shared dataset."
arXiv:2609.08899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech deepfakes can mimic a speaker's voice convincingly enough to deceive listeners and automated systems. This has driven strong progress...
The paper reports that in English all‑words word sense disambiguation (WSD), the scarcity of high‑quality labels—not the models—has become the limiting factor. The authors introduce lexEN, a human‑adjudicated correction layer over the Maru2022 ALL_NEW benchmark, and SenseBench, a living leaderboard for LLM WSD evaluation. They show that frontier large language models reach about 95 % accuracy on lexEN‑v1, that relabeling corpora with these models improves downstream systems, and that fine‑grained WordNet senses are often ill‑posed, with coarsening improving both annotator agreement and model performance. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that improving label quality and managing annotation costs are now the critical challenges for advancing WSD performance, as model accuracy is already near its theoretical ceiling."
The paper introduces three retrieval methods for Polish statutory law that use language‑model annotations attached to articles as surrogates. The methods—ASCR, ASCR‑H, and DTF—vary in cost and quality, with ASCR‑H achieving the highest rank‑one accuracy on bar exam questions, while DTF offers competitive performance with lower latency and cost. Extensive evaluation against 14 baselines on 300 exam questions demonstrates significant improvements in head‑rank accuracy and discusses limitations such as coverage asymmetry and negative results for lemmatisation, pseudo‑relevance feedback, and query rewriting.
The paper introduces CAFE, a method that confines Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) feature distillation to language‑routed adapters in compact multilingual ASR models. By restricting the CKA gradient to adapters that English bypasses, CAFE mitigates the trade‑off where CKA improves non‑English WER at the cost of English performance. On the Open ASR Leaderboard, CAFE reduces average WER from 8.55% to 8.02% and outperforms an adapter‑only capacity control, achieving competitive results across 48 test sets in 24 languages with 254M parameters.