AVERT is a method for spoken dialogue state tracking that improves upon a per-turn text editor by incorporating an audio-conditioned verifier to score candidate slot values. It addresses three types of recoverable errors—inconsistent values across turns, omitted slots, and values unsupported by audio—using three specialized operators: vote, add, and swap, each limited to relevant slots. On the SpokenWOZ dataset, AVERT achieves a joint goal accuracy of 40.13, surpassing both a base speech-LLM (33.04) and a text editor (38.34) without retraining, and matching the performance of a larger end‑to‑end system that processes the full spoken history.
arXiv:2608.28916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly evaluated with word error rate (WER), yet many voice workflows depend on exact written values f...
The paper investigates how to evaluate audio‑language models by separating the use of acoustic evidence from the need to invoke a generative audio model. Using a controlled call‑decision framework, the authors compare policies that rely on transcript labels, encoder outputs from CLAP, AST, or WavLM, and optional calls to generative models such as Qwen2‑Audio, Qwen2.5‑Omni, or MOSS‑Audio. Results on the VocalSound dataset show that while transcript‑only accuracy is low (0.296), encoder‑only controls achieve high accuracy (≈0.85) without any generative calls, and adding generative calls yields only a marginal improvement (0.925 vs. 0.921).
arXiv:2608.22337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-guided referring video object segmentation aims to recover the mask tracks of objects specified by a spoken motion description. Here, speech c...
The paper presents an interpretable, fair, and accurately benchmarked automated system for assessing second‑language English speaking. Using a hybrid of feature‑based speech‑timing metrics and a large language model (LLM) fluency judgment, the system achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.818 with the ICNALE Global Rating Archive, outperforming 81 % of trained human raters. A controlled study shows that encoding pauses into the LLM prompt does not meaningfully affect fluency scores, indicating that the system’s fluency signal derives from measurable speech‑timing features.
arXiv:2609.08899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech deepfakes can mimic a speaker's voice convincingly enough to deceive listeners and automated systems. This has driven strong progress...
arXiv:2608. 19515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged.
Full-duplex speech models require training data that preserves turn-taking, overlap, interruption, and backchannel behavior, yet these signals are entangled across speakers in noisy real-world recordi...
VoxReason introduces a listener‑free evaluation framework that measures whether a speech planning system’s delivery choices—such as pitch, energy, rate, pause, emphasis, and stance—are grounded in cited source records before any waveform is generated. The system outputs a source‑cited speaking plan and uses a deterministic verifier to check citation legality, slot agreement, unsupported states, schema validity, and counterfactual locality. Experiments on 1,440 source‑label cases show that simple slot accuracy can be misleading, while a 7B locality‑based repair model significantly improves plan‑slot accuracy and locality, and removing source records sharply reduces the grounded score. whyItMatters":"The framework provides a concrete, measurable way to ensure that expressive speech systems make source‑licensed planning decisions, addressing a source‑use failure that occurs before audio synthesis."
arXiv:2606. 27698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition systems are notoriously both sensitive to adversarial and benign perturbations.
arXiv:2608. 02673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech editing for content creation requires precise control over both what an edit should do and where it should apply.
Audio-language models (ALMs) are increasingly used as judges for speech-to-speech systems, but a judge that receives audio may not actually use paralinguistic evidence. We introduce counterfactual audits for paralinguistic response evaluation.
arXiv:2609.10366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While AVSR has achieved sub-1% word error rates on the standard LRS3 benchmark, its reliance on broadcast speech obscures whether this reflects true...