arXiv Computer Vision

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

arXiv AI
Aug 6

MERaLiON-GR: Speech Gender Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages

arXiv:2608. 04433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present MERaLiON-GR, a speech gender recognition system that performs binary classification (female / male) on English and Southeast Asian (SEA) languages.

By Qiongqiong Wang, Ai Ti Aw, Nancy F. Chen, Ying Lay Chiu, Yang Ding, Yingxu He, Ridong Jiang, Zhuohan Liu, Yanfeng Lu, Yi Ma, Muhammad Huzaifah, Nabilah Binte Md Johan, Nattadaporn Lertcheva, Pham Minh Duc, Sailor Hardik Bhupendra, Siti Umairah Binte Mohammad Salleh, Shuo Sun, Tarun Kumar Vangani, Jeremy H. M. Wong, Jinyang Wu, Longyin Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Linguistically Augmented Audio Speech Data (LinguAS)

arXiv:2606. 10246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Maliciously-created fake speech, including deepfaked and spoofed audio, is proliferating at an alarming rate, and detection models are racing to stay ahead of the curve.

By Ashley R. Keaton, Zahra Khanjani, Christine Mallinson, Vandana P. Janeja
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

Bias Mitigation in Audio-Enabled LLMs through Adversarial Training and Distillation Methods

The paper presents methods to reduce gender bias in audio‑enabled large language models (AuLLMs) by using adversarial training to unlearn gender perception without harming performance on other tasks. It also introduces a distillation approach that retains gender awareness but aligns responses with a gender‑agnostic teacher unless explicitly prompted. Experiments on three AuLLMs show promising results for gender‑unlearning and partial success for the distillation technique.

By Adnan Al Ali, Jind\v{r}ich Libovick\'y, Anne Lauscher
arXiv AI
Sep 11

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.

By Xiaoqun Liu, Tanu Mitra, Harshit Rajgarhia, Abhishek Mukherji
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

AfriBED: a Speech Recognition Bias Evaluation Dataset for Low Resource African Languages

AfriBED is a newly released speech recognition bias evaluation dataset focused on two low‑resource African languages, Bemba and Nyanja. It contains 9 hours of Bemba speech from 80 speakers (3,928 utterances) and about 18 hours of Nyanja speech from 127 speakers (6,260 utterances). Baseline experiments show the data can be used to detect and quantify gender and speaker‑type bias in ASR systems for these languages.

By Claytone Sikasote, Hussein Suleman, Jan Buys