arXiv AI

Look Less, Hear Better: Jointly Rewarded GRPO for Streaming ASR

The paper introduces AWED, a word‑level emission‑delay metric, and demonstrates that post‑training a delayed‑streaming model with a joint reward (GRPO) improves both accuracy and latency. Using a single operating point (τ=6 frames), the method outperforms both its supervised baseline and the Voxtral Realtime backbone across all lookahead budgets, reducing WER by up to 30.8% at 80 ms delay and lowering median AWED from 1.17 s to 1.04 s.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

GEPARD - Generative, Prosody-aware, Autoregressive text-to-speech model for Realtime Dialogue

GEPARD is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that uses a standard large language model backbone to generate speech autoregressively, decoding audio with an FSQ‑based neural codec. It streams audio chunk‑by‑chunk as text arrives, achieving a real‑time factor of about 0.067 and an aggregate speedup of roughly 204× on a single GPU with 256 concurrent streams. The design keeps all complex auxiliary mechanisms outside the decode loop, enabling deployment with a standard LLM engine (vLLM) without kernel modifications.

By Denis Pavlov, Ulanbek Abdurazakov, Nursultan Bakashov
arXiv AI
Sep 10

X2Streaming-ASR: wait when uncertain, emit when ready for streaming ASR

X2Streaming-ASR introduces a method for streaming automatic speech recognition that separates the decision of when to commit a transcript from what to commit. The approach uses a three‑stage training process: first establishing streaming capability, then warm‑starting a commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refining the policy with character‑level, segment‑assigned group‑relative rewards for accuracy and latency. On AISHELL‑1/2/3 and WenetSpeech datasets, the system achieves mean character‑level commit latencies of 27–84 ms, far lower than baseline systems, while also attaining the best streaming character error rates on AISHELL‑1 and AISHELL‑3.

By Zhiwei Lin, Kaiqi Fu, Rime Wen, Zehan Liu, Shawn Qin, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

TontaubeV1: Streaming Text-to-Speech with Hierarchical Codec Modeling and Bounded Context

TontaubeV1 is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that preserves natural prosody while running on a single consumer GPU. It encodes speech with a hierarchical DualCodec representation at 12.5 Hz, separating a semantic stream from successive acoustic refinements, and uses Qwen3‑derived transformers to predict the semantic stream, utterance duration, and acoustic refinements. The system supports up to one minute of reference audio for voice conditioning, streams with a 200 ms latency to first audio, and achieves real‑time factors of 0.08 (single input) and 0.02 (eight concurrent inputs).

By Fritz Cremer, Jonathan Cremer
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Whisfusion: Parallel ASR Decoding with Masked Diffusion

arXiv:2508. 07048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) encoder-decoder models dominate high-quality multilingual ASR, but their left-to-right decoders make inference latency scale with transcript length.

By Taeyoun Kwon, Junhyuk Ahn, Taegeun Yun, Heeju Jwa, Yoonchae Choi, Siwon Park, Jongchan Kim, Hyungon Ryu, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Nam-Joon Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Audio Interaction Model

arXiv:2606. 05121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio is an inherently interactive modality, yet today's Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are offline, and streaming audio models each handle only a single task such as streaming ASR or voice chatting.

By Zhifei Xie, Zihang Liu, Ze An, Xiaobin Hu, Yue Liao, Ziyang Ma, Dongchao Yang, Mingbao Lin, Deheng Ye, Shuicheng Yan, Chunyan Miao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

TontaubeV1: Streaming Text-to-Speech with Hierarchical Codec Modeling and Bounded Context

TontaubeV1 is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that maintains natural prosody while running on a single consumer GPU. It encodes speech with a hierarchical DualCodec representation at 12.5 Hz, separating a semantic stream from successive acoustic refinements, and uses Qwen3‑derived transformers to predict the semantic stream and add refinements. The model supports up to one minute of reference audio for voice conditioning, streams with a 200 ms latency to first audio, and achieves real‑time factors of 0.08 (single input) and 0.02 (eight concurrent inputs).