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
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
arXiv:2609.09889v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology is fundamental to customer service automation and large-scale transcription. However, even advanced ASR m...
By Yonghyun Jun, Jimin Lee, Hwan Chang, Dongho Shin, Seolah Kim, Hwanhee Lee
The paper introduces ASCIL, a post‑ASR correction framework that re‑evaluates wake‑up intent by combining acoustic embeddings, linguistic cues, device context, and past misclassifications. ASCIL interprets both implicit (hesitation, disengagement, silence) and explicit (cancellation, repetition) signals as noisy indicators of misclassification, enabling online pattern updates without manual annotation. On a proprietary dataset of 3,667 interactions, ASCIL reduces errors by up to 54.27% relative on a session‑disjoint subset and 24.39% at a 0.90 threshold, while adding less than 60 ms of latency and improving intentional acceptance rates.
By Preeti Saraswat, Divya Neelagiri, Anil Yadav
arXiv:2609.22214v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long multilingual conversational spoken question answering requires systems to balance long-range transcript semantics with sparse acoustic and speaker...
By Shangkun Huang, Junchao Hu, Huan Shen, Guoji Wang, Yingao Wang, Shaosai Li, Wei Zou, Yunzhang Chen
The paper introduces LOGIC (Logit‑Space Integration for Contextual Biasing), a new framework that injects contextual entity information directly into the decoding layer of Speech Large Language Models, bypassing the limitations of prompt‑based methods. LOGIC operates with constant‑time complexity regardless of the size of the entity list, and experiments with the Phi‑4‑MM model across 11 multilingual locales show an average 9% relative reduction in Entity WER while adding only a 0.30% increase in False Alarm Rate.
By Peidong Wang, Jian Xue, Jinyu Li
arXiv:2608.22236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) have shown promising progress in understanding speech, music, and general sound events, yet their ability...
By Yize Li, Ningyuan Yang, Sile Yin, Sindhuja Thogarrati, Sung-En Chang, Andrew C. Singer, Xue Lin, Chuan-Che Huang, Shuo Zhang
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:2609.37818v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue requires models to use both what is said and how it is said to decide how to respond. Explicit CoT can improve paralinguis...
By Shengbo Cai, Yuxiang Wang, Jingran Xie, Zhisheng Zhang, Shun Lei, Di Cao, Teddy Sun, Zhiyong Wu
arXiv:2609.10394v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Current audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) benchmarks, like LRS3, rely heavily on clean, scripted and rehearsed speech. They fail to reflect the...
By Rishabh Jain, Aristeidis Papadopoulos, Zhaofeng Lin, Naomi Harte
arXiv:2608.28916v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly evaluated with word error rate (WER), yet many voice workflows depend on exact written values f...
By Tyler Baumgartner, Brandon Tai, Lisa Kaelin-Martin, Candice Fan, Luc Debaupte, Bill Wang, Yi Zhong
arXiv:2607. 14846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current voice AI benchmarks typically evaluate isolated capabilities such as speech intelligibility, word error rate, or text-based dialogue quality, but they rarely test whether systems harness the acoustic information that distinguishes spoken language from its textual representation.
By David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks, Franc Camps-Febrer, Jakub Piotr C{\l}apa, Theo Lebryk, Jens Madsen, Olya Ossipova, Sharath Rao, Hoon Shin, Tigran Soghbatyan, Georg Streich, Rashish Tandon, Panagiotis Tzirakis