arXiv AI

Voice or Stereotype? Disentangling Acoustic and Content-Based Gender in Speech-to-Speech Models

The study investigates how speech‑to‑speech (S2S) models handle gender, distinguishing between the acoustic voice and the content’s gender cues. Experiments across five models in English, Spanish, and Mandarin show that while the rendered voice remains unbiased, the models consistently attribute speaker gender based on textual content rather than voice. When content and voice disagree, misgendering rates soar to 90%, whereas agreement yields only 2% misgendering.

arXiv Computer Vision
1d ago

Face-voice Association across LAnguages and Gender (FLAG) 2027 Challenge Evaluation Plan

arXiv:2609.17913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Face--voice association models may rely on language or gender cues in the voice rather than on speaker-specific voice characteristics, which can lead t...

By Marta Moscati, Swapnil Khandoker, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Shah Nawaz, Fatima Noor, Rohan Kumar Das, Mubashir Noman, Junaid Mir, Muhammad Haroon Yousaf, Khalid Malik, Markus Schedl
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Alignment Reduces Expressed but Not Encoded Gender Bias: A Unified Framework and Study

The paper introduces a unified framework that simultaneously measures intrinsic (encoded) and extrinsic (expressed) gender bias in large language models using identical neutral prompts. It finds a consistent link between latent gender information and output bias, but shows that alignment via supervised fine‑tuning reduces expressed bias while leaving internal gender associations largely intact and reactivatable by adversarial prompts. The study also demonstrates that debiasing gains on structured benchmarks may not transfer to realistic tasks such as story generation.

By Nour Bouchouchi, Thibault Laugel, Xavier Renard, Christophe Marsala, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Marcin Detyniecki
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

When Noise Fabricates Bias: The Fragility of LLM-as-a-Judge Bias Measurement under Noisy Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assess social bias in text, but the passages they evaluate often contain surface noise such as typos and broken punctuation. This study applied five realistic noise conditions at varying intensities to 3,822 stereotype‑related responses and compared bias judgments on noisy versus original text. The findings show that noise disproportionately turns neutral judgments into biased ones—up to 120 times more likely—while rarely converting biased judgments into neutral ones, and that the most fragile LLM judge exhibits the greatest distortion at mild noise levels. As LLMs become more robust, the bias distortion tends toward parity rather than reversal, meaning bias measured on noisy text is systematically overestimated, especially in fairness‑critical categories.

By DongHyun Ryu, Jaehyeok Lee, YeongJun Hwang, JinYeong Bak
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Heard but Not Heeded: Paralinguistic Information Encoding and Loss in Audio-Language Models

The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.

By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj