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.
arXiv:2607. 15755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) aims to synthesize speech with human-like emotional expression and contextual consistency in user-agent interactions.
arXiv:2606. 00851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue systems must infer a user's emotional state to respond appropriately, yet everyday speech often carries weak, neutral, or ambiguous affective cues.
arXiv:2606. 30543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the proliferation of speech AI agents, understanding emotional entrainment in conversational interaction has become increasingly important.
The paper introduces DSSM-CRF, an audio‑only architecture for conversational speech emotion recognition that separates cross‑speaker contextual influence from within‑speaker emotion evolution. It uses bidirectional state‑space models to encode fused self‑supervised speech representations at both frame and dialogue scales, then orders each speaker’s utterances into an independent dynamic conditional random field chain. The model achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on IEMOCAP and MELD, with complementary gains from speaker‑wise factorization and CRF modeling.
VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.
arXiv:2609.22697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, text-to-speech systems have made significant progress in speech expressiveness and controllability. However, the speaking style of generated...
arXiv:2608.20905v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Face-to-face audiovisual interaction is central to human communication, conveying rich emotional and social cues. However, existing multimodal dialogue...
arXiv:2606. 08573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech emotion recognition (SER) is commonly formulated as utterance-level classification, although conversational emotion depends on a speaker's usual vocal range and the emotional context established by previous utterances.
The paper introduces an LLM-based framework for continuous dimensional emotion evaluation in multimodal dialogue, combining discrete emotion recognition with Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) assessment on the IEMOCAP dataset. It incorporates acoustic cues as natural language descriptions via the SpeechCueLLM approach and evaluates six models from the LLaMA, GPT, and Qwen families using zero-shot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning. LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA models outperform prompt-engineered GPT models, achieving a new state-of-the-art Valence CCC of 0.7822, and ablation studies show that textual audio descriptions significantly benefit smaller models. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that domain adaptation through fine-tuning can surpass larger GPT models in multimodal emotion evaluation, highlighting the importance of tailored training for emotion recognition tasks."
arXiv:2609.05806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) aims to identify speakers' emotions in multi-turn dialogue. Accurate emotion recognition can support a wide...
arXiv:2608.28932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Voice products increasingly need affective cues that are present in speech but absent from transcripts. We introduce VocalAffectBench, a public, test-o...
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.