arXiv Machine Learning

Reading Less While Writing: A Closed-Form Bandwidth Dial for Streaming Multimodal Decoders

The paper introduces ZENDAYA, a closed‑form bandwidth dial that replaces fixed wait‑k rules in streaming multimodal decoders with a single continuous parameter γ. This schedule ties the visible source prefix to generation progress and the input’s predicted length, allowing a single offline decoder to serve as both offline and real‑time streaming models. Experiments on video‑to‑text and audio‑to‑text tasks show that reading less of the source can improve text quality, with significant METEOR gains across three public corpora.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

Look Less, Hear Better: Jointly Rewarded GRPO for Streaming ASR

The paper introduces AWED, a word‑level emission‑delay metric, and demonstrates that post‑training a delayed‑streaming model with a joint reward (GRPO) improves both accuracy and latency. Using a single operating point (τ=6 frames), the method outperforms both its supervised baseline and the Voxtral Realtime backbone across all lookahead budgets, reducing WER by up to 30.8% at 80 ms delay and lowering median AWED from 1.17 s to 1.04 s.

By Xiuwen Zheng
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

The Lattice of Transition Laws

The paper introduces a framework that unifies diffusion and autoregressive (AR) generative models as paths on a corruption lattice, defining a cost for decoding schedules based on discarded parallel steps. It shows that the minimal number of steps for a zero‑cost schedule is determined by the data’s geometry—specifically, the graph’s treedepth for Markov data—providing a theoretical limit for both token and continuous field models. By estimating pairwise dependencies from pretrained weights, the authors predict the ranking of decoding schedules before execution, and validate these predictions across text, image, and video generation tasks.

By T. Y. Tsui, Jiatao Gu, Lingjie Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Vision Is Not Overhead: One-Pass Block Drafting for Lossless Speculative Decoding in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces GLANCE, a one‑pass block drafting method that enables lossless speculative decoding for vision‑language models. By using a block‑diffusion head that reads the fused vision‑language state, GLANCE eliminates the need for the drafter to process the image at every step, allowing it to fill an entire block in a single forward pass. Experiments show that GLANCE can decode up to 2.93× faster than autoregressive decoding while maintaining exact greedy decoding results across multiple tasks.

By Jungseob Lee, Seongtae Hong, Dongyub Jude Lee, Chanjun Park, Jaehyung Seo, Sugyeong Eo, Heuiseok Lim
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Have I Seen Enough? Frozen Video-Language Models Encode Evidence Readiness

The paper investigates whether frozen video‑language models inherently encode a signal indicating whether sufficient evidence has been observed to answer a question. By training linear probes on seven byte‑identical models, the authors demonstrate that these models contain a readable evidence‑readiness signal with AUROC ranging from 0.733 to 0.905, even when the probe is trained without any footage from the benchmark family. The signal is question‑conditioned, remains robust when the model answers incorrectly, and outperforms traditional uncertainty estimators; it can be leveraged as a Readiness Gating policy that improves answer accuracy by up to 9.75 percentage points without extra computational cost.

By Dan Ben-Ami, Kobi Cohen, Chaim Baskin
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Transcribe, Then Reason: Two-Pass Decomposition for Multimodal Review

The paper demonstrates that a single-pass multimodal model struggles to produce faithful, comprehensive reviews of long recordings or documents, often omitting a third of the content and embellishing the rest. By splitting the task into two passes—first transcribing the source and then reviewing the transcript—the authors show improved faithfulness and coverage across a diverse set of 21 sources. The benefit is most pronounced for longer or weaker baseline cases, while the approach introduces new failure modes such as space constraints and memory confabulation.

By Bojie Li, Noah Shi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

GEPARD - Generative, Prosody-aware, Autoregressive text-to-speech model for Realtime Dialogue

GEPARD is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that uses a standard large language model backbone to generate speech autoregressively, decoding audio with an FSQ‑based neural codec. It streams audio chunk‑by‑chunk as text arrives, achieving a real‑time factor of about 0.067 and an aggregate speedup of roughly 204× on a single GPU with 256 concurrent streams. The design keeps all complex auxiliary mechanisms outside the decode loop, enabling deployment with a standard LLM engine (vLLM) without kernel modifications.

By Denis Pavlov, Ulanbek Abdurazakov, Nursultan Bakashov