Automatic speech recognition is dominated by autoregressive decoders that emit one token at a time. We ask whether a discrete diffusion language model can transcribe speech instead, refining a whole transcript in parallel over a small number of denoising steps.
arXiv:2508. 07048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) encoder-decoder models dominate high-quality multilingual ASR, but their left-to-right decoders make inference latency scale with transcript length.
By Taeyoun Kwon, Junhyuk Ahn, Taegeun Yun, Heeju Jwa, Yoonchae Choi, Siwon Park, Jongchan Kim, Hyungon Ryu, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Nam-Joon Kim
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:2607. 06831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-text alignment means finding the temporal boundaries of each word in the audio.
By Albert Zeyer, Ralf Schl\"uter, Hermann Ney
arXiv:2605.28456v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Existing Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) systems commonly rely on left-to-right autoregressive decoding, which can force premature decisions on vis...
By Jeong Hun Yeo, Chae Won Kim, Hyeongseop Rha, Yong Man Ro
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
arXiv:2609.13909v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Continuous-latent Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer (AR-DiT) models have demonstrated immense potential in zero-shot speech generation. However, t...
By Ziyu Zhang, Tianlun Zuo, Hanzhao Li, Haoyu Zhang, Lei Xie
SPAR-K is a scheduled periodic alternating early‑exit framework for interleaved spoken language models that reduces decoding depth for speech tokens while maintaining quality. It lets most speech positions exit at a fixed intermediate layer and inserts periodic full‑depth refresh steps to counter distribution shift. Experiments on Step‑Audio‑2‑mini and GLM‑4‑Voice show up to 11 % depth reduction with less than 0.82 % drop in question‑answering accuracy and negligible impact on MOS and WER.
By Hsiao-Ying Huang, Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-yi Lee
arXiv:2605. 13087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning multilingual ASR models like Whisper for low-resource languages often improves read speech but degrades spontaneous audio performance.
By Kush Juvekar, Kavya Manohar, Aditya Srinivas Menon, Arghya Bhattacharya, Kumarmanas Nethil
arXiv:2609.14991v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Open Thai automatic speech recognition (ASR) is dominated by offline, Whisper-based models that read the whole utterance before transcribing, ruling ou...
By Warit Sirichotedumrong, Tanawin Samutsin, Shah Faisal Wani, Sittipong Sripaisarnmongkol, Kunat Pipatanakul
arXiv:2511. 20973v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) deliver strong performance across speech and audio tasks, but their audio encoders generate high-rate token sequences (e.
By Saurabhchand Bhati, Samuel Thomas, Hilde Kuehne, Rogerio Feris, James Glass
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