Audio large language models (Audio LLMs) often fail to transcribe English‑Mandarin code‑switching speech, exhibiting language omission, translation‑instead‑of‑transcription, and hallucination. By applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with 100 K preference pairs, the models learn to preserve mixed‑language content rather than translate, leading to significant reductions in mixed‑error rates (up to 89.6% in‑distribution). The study demonstrates that DPO can effectively align multilingual Audio LLMs for accurate code‑switching transcription.
arXiv:2609. 11786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and audio language models (audio LMs) now report low error rates on monolingual benchmarks, but their behavior on code switched speech in low resource, diacritic rich languages remains poorly characterized.
arXiv:2606. 19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training.
VietPrism is a newly released, large‑scale Vietnamese speech corpus that combines 993.4 hours of real utterances from 1,262 verified speakers with 3.1 k hours of synthetic spoof speech. It uniquely offers transcripts, consistent speaker identities, five dialect groups, and extensive Vietnamese‑English code‑switching—nearly half of the corpus—while pairing each spoof with a matched bona fide utterance. The dataset enables controlled evaluation of deep‑fake detection models, revealing significant variability in detector performance across dialects and speaker similarity.
Current speech translation systems, including SpeechLLMs, are trained on cleaned text and tend to strip disfluencies like filled pauses and false starts rather than translate them. We show this comes at a cost: disfluencies carry meaning that gets lost when speech is cleaned up.
arXiv:2609.01016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current speech synthesis struggles with code-switching, which mixes a foreign language phrase into a primary language utterance, causing the phrase to...
The paper investigates whether training small decoder-only transformers on code‑switched text can induce cross‑lingual alignment. Using two 100‑million‑word multilingual corpora—one a mix of English, Dutch, and Chinese BabyBabelLM data, and another generated by inserting word‑ and sentence‑level code‑switching via an LLM—the authors find that code‑switched training aligns representations of parallel text, especially across different scripts, and that this alignment persists when later training on monolingual documents. A curriculum that progresses from word‑level code‑switching to sentence‑level code‑switching and finally to monolingual data yields models that outperform baselines on the BabyLM evaluation suite, demonstrating that code‑switching curriculum learning is an effective data augmentation strategy for multilingual pretraining.
arXiv:2609.14231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Controllable synthesis of nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs) is es- sential for natural and expressive speech, but remains challeng- ing due to their aco...
arXiv:2607. 02633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present GRAFT, a per-word pronunciation conditioning mechanism for text-to-speech neural codec language modeling.
arXiv:2606. 01016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While End-to-End (E2E) Speech-Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs) are rapidly evolving, their evaluation methodologies remain limited to the era of simple transcription.
arXiv:2607. 10092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spoken language models (SLMs) unify speech perception and reasoning, but adapting them to sensitive domains is underexplored, especially when the original training data is inaccessible and the use case demands multilingual, spoken-query interaction.
The paper investigates how multilingual large language models can unintentionally switch languages during generation. It compares three techniques—ValSel, FreqSel, and AnnSel—for pinpointing latent variables that control language choice in cross‑layer transcoders. Using new multilingual benchmarks and targeted interventions on Gemma‑2‑2B and Qwen3‑4B, the study finds all methods can steer output language, with FreqSel performing best and AnnSel providing interpretable selections via explicit annotations.
The paper investigates how to close the quality gap in low‑resource text‑to‑speech for Khmer and Korean using the VoxCPM2 model. By training a single low‑rank adaptation (LoRA) adapter on a shared 25.5‑hour corpus, the authors improve Khmer’s mean opinion score from 3.85 to 4.23 with a rank‑64 adapter, while Korean shows no significant gain. The study highlights that adaptation benefits mainly when the base model is weak and that training loss does not always align with human ratings.