The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.
By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have been widely used as judge models for the automatic evaluation of generated speech. However, prior approaches predominantly focus on holistic naturalness, leaving fine-grained paralinguistic distinctions underexplored.
arXiv:2605. 00025v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech neuroprosthesis systems decode intended speech from neural activity in the absence of audible output, offering a path to restoring communication for individuals with speech-impairing conditions.
By Yuanhao Chen, Peter Chin
arXiv:2607. 14846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current voice AI benchmarks typically evaluate isolated capabilities such as speech intelligibility, word error rate, or text-based dialogue quality, but they rarely test whether systems harness the acoustic information that distinguishes spoken language from its textual representation.
By David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks, Franc Camps-Febrer, Jakub Piotr C{\l}apa, Theo Lebryk, Jens Madsen, Olya Ossipova, Sharath Rao, Hoon Shin, Tigran Soghbatyan, Georg Streich, Rashish Tandon, Panagiotis Tzirakis
SPAR-K is a scheduled periodic alternating early‑exit framework for interleaved spoken language models that reduces decoding depth for speech tokens while maintaining quality. It lets most speech positions exit at a fixed intermediate layer and inserts periodic full‑depth refresh steps to counter distribution shift. Experiments on Step‑Audio‑2‑mini and GLM‑4‑Voice show up to 11 % depth reduction with less than 0.82 % drop in question‑answering accuracy and negligible impact on MOS and WER.
By Hsiao-Ying Huang, Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-yi Lee
arXiv:2606. 07080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present dots.
By Shi Lian, Changtao Li, Bohan Li, Hankun Wang, Da Zheng, Junfeng Tian, Yufeng Ma, Colin Zhang, Kai Yu
arXiv:2608. 00722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language model-based text-to-speech (LM-based TTS) remains vulnerable to speech hallucinations that deviate from the target text.
By Chenlin Liu, Minghui Fang, Zhonghao Bi, Zekai Su, Rong Wang, Jiqing Han
arXiv:2609.15313v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Autoregressive generation of interleaved text and acoustic tokens is a common approach to spoken-response generation in speech large language models....
By Daxin Tan, Dehua Tao, Chengxi Deng, Hanlin Zhang, Xiao Chen
arXiv:2609.05871v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Audio-conditioned language models often underuse acoustic cues such as prosody, emotion, and non-speech sounds, raising the question of whether ASR-s...
By Song-ha Jo, Sehyun Lee, Soyoon Kim, Jaesik Choi, Sanghyuk Choi
arXiv:2607. 03806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio foundation models are widely adopted as general-purpose feature extractors, yet the internal structure of their learned representations remains insufficiently understood.
By H\'ector Martel, Joe Hennessy-Priest, Taemin Cho
arXiv:2608. 02235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems have substantially improved speech naturalness and intelligibility across many languages.
By Ali Jafar, Amal Sarmad, Shifa Yousaf, Maryam Bashir
arXiv:2609.38887v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-time voice conversion (VC) systems commonly rely on pretrained speaker embeddings from automatic speaker verification (ASV) models. While effect...
By Mu-Ruei Tseng, Waris Quamer, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna