SpeechCritic learns a diagnostic speech judge from only about 300 human-labeled comparisons, calibrating a frontier audio-language model with non-binding hints that select acoustic measurements agreeing with human judgments. The approach improves dimension-level agreement by 6.3 points and reduces mismatch in Tie rates by 10.4 points, and training a 7B judge with SFT, OPD, and RL yields distinct behaviors, with RL producing more specific rationales. The method works across language pairs, demonstrating a path from limited human preferences to a diagnostic speech judge.
By Mingyue Huo, Shivam Mehta, Bhavin Jawade, Yinghong Lan, Haoqi Li
arXiv:2608.31035v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Codec-based text-to-speech (TTS) models make language-model post-training applicable to speech generation, but it remains unclear when learned perceptu...
By Joonyong Park, Jerry Li
The paper introduces Live-ProsodyJudge (LPJ), a cost‑effective pairwise evaluator distilled from Gemini for assessing fine‑grained prosody in live streaming TTS. It identifies a flaw called verdict coupling, where multi‑dimensional scores collapse into a single preference, and proposes Decoupled‑Live‑ProsodyJudge (D‑LPJ) to eliminate this issue through masking and a span‑local GRPO strategy. Experiments show LPJ outperforms a single Gemini call in accuracy, and D‑LPJ provides independent dimension judgments, achieving high alignment with human top‑3 selections in a TTS candidate tournament.
By Zifan Guan, Longyu Lu, Junan Zhang, Zhizheng Wu, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma
The paper introduces SITAR, a situational distortion metric for evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. SITAR aggregates situational severity and cumulative extent into a unified score using a bounded recursive formulation, and is implemented as a lightweight BERT-family regressor that requires minimal runtime cost. The authors validate SITAR through extrinsic and intrinsic protocols, showing it tracks capability scaling and provides diagnostic utility across diverse datasets and models.
By Mingzhe Lu, Jinhao Liu, Yunpeng Li, Hang Su, Lichun Fan, Jian Luan
arXiv:2609.18533v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems exhibit unequal error rates across speaker groups, motivating interventions on their internal representation...
By Nicolas Bourrel, Abderrahmane Issam, Gerasimos Spanakis
arXiv:2602.22710v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is the dominant framework for aligning AI systems to human preferences. However, evaluation pr...
By Aaron Broukhim, Nadir Weibel, Eshin Jolly
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...
By Mengzhe Geng, Yujia Lu, Patrick Littell, Manuela Kunz, Xie Chen
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.
By Eichi Uehara
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems exhibit unequal error rates across speaker groups, motivating interventions on their internal representations. We ask whether speaker-linked attributes that...
arXiv:2606. 19951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models are widely used as proxy metrics in text-to-speech (TTS) research, yet their ability to capture quality differences beyond acoustic fidelity remains unclear.
By Masato Takagi, Masaya Kawamura, Reo Shimizu, Yuma Shirahata
arXiv:2608. 02235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems have substantially improved speech naturalness and intelligibility across many languages.
By Ali Jafar, Amal Sarmad, Shifa Yousaf, Maryam Bashir
The paper investigates whether audio large language models (Audio LLMs) can detect when their own transcriptions are unreliable. It finds that the models are poor at self-assessment and that existing methods offer limited detection. By leveraging audio-encoder representations, the authors develop a lightweight predictor that accurately flags unreliable transcriptions and can prompt user clarification without altering the underlying model.
By Amirhosein Javadi, Richa Dixit, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Minsik Cho, Devang Naik, Mohammad Samragh