arXiv AI

SpeechGym: An Audio-Native Gym for Training Voice Agents via Reinforcement Learning

SpeechGym is an audio‑native environment that lets two omni‑modal models converse entirely in native audio, eliminating external ASR/TTS and API boundaries while preserving the tasks, tools, and success checks of a standard text‑based agent benchmark. By training end‑to‑end, the framework addresses perceptual failures—such as misheard arguments that cascade into failed calls—and behavioural failures, both of which are automatically labeled for free. Using per‑turn process rewards to overcome reward sparsity, agents trained in SpeechGym transfer to an independent voice benchmark, doubling task success and improving efficiency in turns and tokens.

arXiv AI
Jul 31

Voice Memory for Agentic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2607. 26410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Voice Memory, a inference-only scheme for agentic speech recognition: at stream time, a frozen corrector reads a single per-domain memory.

By Chao-Han Huck Yang, Zih-Ching Chen, Piotr Zelasko, Zhehuai Chen, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg
arXiv AI
Aug 10

MetaSICL: Globalizing Auditory LLMs for Underserved Speakers and Languages via Meta Speech In-Context Learning

arXiv:2601. 18904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI for speech and audio is increasingly expected to serve users across languages, cultures, and communities, yet current auditory Large Language Models (LLMs) are still largely trained and evaluated on high-resource data.

By Haolong Zheng, Siyin Wang, Zengrui Jin, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
arXiv AI
Aug 5

GROW: Group-Relative Advantage-Weighted On-Policy Reinforcement Learning of Autoregressive-Diffusion Text-to-Speech model

arXiv:2608. 03215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for flow-matching text-to-speech is complicated by deterministic ODE sampling: trajectory-level policy-gradient methods typically convert the ODE into an SDE and track per-step likelihood ratios, introducing stochastic perturbations and substantial overhead.

By Guanrou Yang, Tian Tan, Qian Chen, Ziyang Ma, Yakun Song, Zhikang Niu, Qi Chen, Wenming Tu, Haitao Li, Shan Yang, Xie Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Hear2Act: Benchmarking When Prosody Should Change What an Assistant Does

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. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.

arXiv AI
Jun 10

Speech Meets ELF: Audio Conditional Continuous-Target Diffusion for Speech Recognition and Translation

arXiv:2606. 10368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-text (S2T) systems for recognition (ASR) and translation (S2TT) typically generate discrete text tokens.

By Xuanchen Li, Tianrui Wang, Yuheng Lu, Zikang Huang, Yu Jiang, Chenghan Lin, Chenrui Cui, Ziyang Ma, Xingyu Ma, Chunyu Qiang, Guochen Yu, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Audio Interaction Model

arXiv:2606. 05121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio is an inherently interactive modality, yet today's Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are offline, and streaming audio models each handle only a single task such as streaming ASR or voice chatting.

By Zhifei Xie, Zihang Liu, Ze An, Xiaobin Hu, Yue Liao, Ziyang Ma, Dongchao Yang, Mingbao Lin, Deheng Ye, Shuicheng Yan, Chunyan Miao
arXiv AI
1d ago

When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.

By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges

The article surveys multi‑turn conversational AI, highlighting its shift from isolated text prompts to sustained, multimodal interactions that involve clarifying goals, revising requests, and switching topics. It reviews literature across text‑only dialogue, AudioLLMs, multimodal and omni‑modal systems, and tool‑augmented agents, organizing findings around datasets, models, training, evaluation, and cross‑cutting challenges. The analysis reveals that while multimodal perception and action have progressed rapidly, systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross‑turn grounding, full‑duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment.

By Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury