arXiv Machine Learning

TargetSEC: Plug-and-Play In-the-Wild Speech Emotion Conversion via Arousal-Conditioned Latent Style Diffusion

arXiv:2606. 07293v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech Emotion Conversion (SEC) aims to transform the emotion of a source utterance into a target emotion while preserving content and speaker identity.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

EmoTra-TTS: Smooth Intra-Utterance Emotion Transitions for Speech Synthesis

EmoTra‑TTS introduces a method for smooth intra‑utterance emotion transitions in speech synthesis. It uses a multi‑pass flow blending pipeline, dual‑stage VAD conditioning, and direction‑magnitude decoupled injection to generate frame‑aligned emotional prosody. The system adds only 0.43% more parameters, incurs no latency, and outperforms four state‑of‑the‑art baselines and two commercial systems in emotion transition quality and overall preference tests.

By Tianchi Liu, Zeyang Song, Tianrui Wang, Zhipeng Li, Chenglin Xu, Yiwen Guo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Enriching Speech Emotion Representations with Conversational Context

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.

By Arthur Peuvot, Romaric Besan\c{c}on, Ga\"el de Chalendar, Bianca Vieru, Ioana Vasilescu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Alignment-Free Text-Audiobox for Voice Dubbing and Full-Duplex Dialogue Synthesis

The paper introduces Alignment-Free Text‑Audiobox (Text‑AB), a unified diffusion‑based framework that performs high‑quality voice dubbing and full‑duplex dialogue synthesis without requiring forced alignment. Text‑AB uses a latent diffusion model with DAC‑VAE features, achieving over 10× compression compared to prior EnCodec representations, and learns text‑speech alignment via cross‑attention. The authors pretrain a 3B‑parameter model on 480k hours of monolingual speech and fine‑tune it for cross‑lingual dubbing, full‑duplex dialogue, and emotional dialogue, reporting significant improvements in prosody, voice similarity, naturalness, and emotional expressivity over existing internal systems.

By Sanyuan Chen, Min-Jae Hwang, Sho Inoue, Anna Sun, Bokai Yu, David Kant, Dongmin Hyun, Dorian Desblancs, Gregory Antonovsky, Oleg Repin, Peng-Jen Chen, Xutai Ma, Zehai Tu, Juan Pino, Wei-Ning Hsu
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Towards Unified Song Generation and Singing Voice Conversion with Accompaniment Co-Generation

arXiv:2606. 07015v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While song generation and singing voice conversion (SVC) have evolved significantly, they have long been developed isolated: the former lacks zero-shot speaker cloning, while the latter overlooks vocal-accompaniment synergy.

By Ziyu Zhang, Chunyu Qiang, Xiaopeng Wang, Yuxin Guo, Kang Yin, Wenjie Tian, Jingbin Hu, Tianlun Zuo, Zhao Guo, Teng Ma, Yuzhe Liang, Chen Zhang, Lei Xie
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 17

VoiceDesigner: Text-to-Voice Generation and Editing via Unified Diffusion Modeling and Data Augmentation

arXiv:2608. 13613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in generative models have made text-to-voice generation (TTV) possible, enabling the synthesis of speech directly from textual voice descriptions.

By Jiarui Hai, Karan Thakkar, Ke Chen, Yunyun Wang, Jiaqi Su, Rithesh Kumar, Mounya Elhilali, Zeyu Jin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Dual-Scale State-Space Modeling with Speaker-Wise Dynamic CRF for Speech Emotion Recognition in Conversation

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.

By Guan-Hua Wen, Hou-Chiang Tseng, Kuan-Yu Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 30

TRACE: Temporal Relationship-Aware Conversational Entrainment Detection in Dyadic Speech

arXiv:2606. 30543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the proliferation of speech AI agents, understanding emotional entrainment in conversational interaction has become increasingly important.

By Sathvik Manikantan Napa Ugandhar, Hao Zhang, Alison Gunzler, Yuzhe Wang, Thomas Thebaud, Georgi Tinchev, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Laureano Moro-Vel\'azquez