The paper introduces ABX-Accent, a benchmark for evaluating how well unsupervised speech representation learning models adapt to new accents. It uses the AESRC dataset with 10 English accents, each providing less than 10 hours of unlabeled data, and adapts the Zero Resources Challenge ABX metrics to these accents. A baseline model employing adaptive domain normalization to fine‑tune a Contrastive Predictive Coding model shows a 23.6% relative improvement on across‑speaker ABX scores compared to non‑adapted models.
arXiv:2605. 03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability.
By Van-Phat Thai, Aradhya Dhruv, Duc-Thinh Pham, Sameer Alam
arXiv:2609.17981v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-R...
By Mohan Shi, Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang, Eray Eren, Abeer Alwan
Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), have shown strong Automatic Sp...
The paper evaluates the robustness of DistilHuBERT for accent classification using speaker‑disjoint splits and cross‑corpus tests with L2‑ARCTIC and other English accent datasets. It finds a large performance gap between in‑corpus and external evaluations, indicating that file‑level tests overestimate accuracy. The study shows that balanced external‑data training performs best, while pseudo‑labeling with confidence filtering is insufficient under domain mismatch.
By Xu He, Homayoon Beigi
arXiv:2609.38887v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-time voice conversion (VC) systems commonly rely on pretrained speaker embeddings from automatic speaker verification (ASV) models. While effect...
By Mu-Ruei Tseng, Waris Quamer, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
arXiv:2603. 29042v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Phone recognition (PR) is a key enabler of multilingual and low-resource speech processing tasks, yet robust performance remains elusive.
By Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Kwanghee Choi, Eunjung Yeo, William Chen, Shinji Watanabe, David R. Mortensen
arXiv:2509.10452v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Pretrained automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper perform well but still need domain adaptation to handle unseen parlance....
By Akshat Pandey, Karun Kumar, Raphael Tang
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...
By Ziyu Zhang, Yun Chen, Taihui Wang, Hanzhao Li, Qicong Xie, Rilin Chen, Zhixian Zhao, Lei Xie
arXiv:2610.07426v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Accent classifiers are typically trained with a fixed label inventory and cannot accommodate new accent categories as new data becomes available. Mor...
By Mu-Ruei Tseng, Waris Quamer, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) have substantially improved speech quality and voice cloning fidelity. However, many zero-shot TTS systems still depend on audio prompt transcripts at inference time.
The paper presents BiMamba2, a 47.88‑million‑parameter bidirectional Mamba‑2 encoder trained with masked discrete‑unit prediction for multilingual speech representation. It was trained on 250 hours of unlabeled speech from 67 languages and evaluated in the Unsupervised Speech in the Wild Challenge, achieving an Adjusted Rand Index of 0.735 for speaker clustering while reporting lower performance on language identification and character error rate compared to supervised baselines. The authors also discuss a discrepancy between local‑official metric scales and checkpoint rankings, underscoring the limits of in‑distribution diagnostics for predicting Dynabench probe outcomes.
By Prakriti Subedi, Howard Prioleau, Saurav K Aryal