arXiv:2602. 03420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content.
By Siyi Wang, Shihong Tan, Siyi Liu, Hong Jia, Gongping Huang, James Bailey, Ting Dang
EmoTra‑TTS introduces a method for smooth intra‑utterance emotion transitions in speech synthesis. It uses a multi‑pass flow blending pipeline, dual‑stage VAD conditioning, and direction‑magnitude decoupled injection to generate frame‑aligned emotional prosody. The system adds only 0.43% more parameters, incurs no latency, and outperforms four state‑of‑the‑art baselines and two commercial systems in emotion transition quality and overall preference tests.
By Tianchi Liu, Zeyang Song, Tianrui Wang, Zhipeng Li, Chenglin Xu, Yiwen Guo
arXiv:2606. 00851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue systems must infer a user's emotional state to respond appropriately, yet everyday speech often carries weak, neutral, or ambiguous affective cues.
By Sukru Samet Dindar, Riki Shimizu, Xilin Jiang, Nima Mesgarani
arXiv:2606. 09837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotional interaction is increasingly crucial for conversational AI, yet current systems lack a self-emotion determination mechanism to drive the streaming text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis.
By Yue Zhao, Hongyan Li, Yong Chen, Luo Ji
arXiv:2607. 15755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational Speech Synthesis (CSS) aims to synthesize speech with human-like emotional expression and contextual consistency in user-agent interactions.
By Zhenqi Jia, Yuan Zhao, Aruukhan, Rui Liu, Haizhou Li
arXiv:2601. 03888v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In prior work, we introduced IndexTTS 2, a zero-shot neural text-to-speech foundation model comprising two core components: a transformer-based Text-to-Semantic (T2S) module and a non-autoregressive Semantic-to-Mel (S2M) module, which together enable faithful emotion replication and establish the first autoregressive duration-controllable generative paradigm.
By Yunpei Li, Xun Zhou, Jinchao Wang, Lu Wang, Yong Wu, Siyi Zhou, Yiquan Zhou, Yining Wang, Yaogen Yang, Zhetao Hu, Shiyao Duan, Jiacheng Xu, Bin Xia, Jingchen Shu
The paper introduces EmoStance, a method for controlling the affective orientation of empathetic responses by leveraging weak supervision from emoji distributions. It builds the EmojiDialogue dataset, extending EmpatheticDialogues with emoji votes and confidence scores, and uses a frozen instruction‑tuned LLM steered by continuous prefix embeddings to generate responses that align with the listener’s stance. In blind pairwise evaluations, EmoStance achieves a 62.2% decisive win rate, notably improving contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness compared to baselines.
By Ziyuan Jin, Yuxuan Ge, Zheng Tian
arXiv:2601. 12494v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio large language models (LLMs) enable unified speech understanding and generation, but adapting them to linguistically complex and dialect-rich settings such as Arabic-English remains challenging.
By Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
arXiv:2606. 27717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prosodic emphasis varies across languages, emotions, and speaking styles, yet existing emphasis detection models are largely trained and evaluated on monolingual neutral read speech.
By Megan Wei, Deepali Aneja, Jiaqi Su, Yunyun Wang, Haonan Chen, Zeyu Jin
Poly-InstructTTS is a text‑to‑speech system that learns expressive speech from open‑ended natural‑language instructions using a 1,000‑hour, 1,000‑plus emotion and style annotated audiovisual corpus. The approach employs a prompt‑free GPT with attribute‑based thinking tokens and a flow‑matching module to inject timbre from reference audio, and includes a speaker fine‑tuning procedure to transfer instruction control while preserving speaker persona. Experiments demonstrate strong instruction adherence and expressiveness, with audio demos and an expanded test set available on the project page.
By Junhui Zhang, Qianhui Xu, Qingxiang Guo, Dawei Yang, Ling Miao, Qiangqiang Wang, Yang Song
arXiv:2603. 06194v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) has shown strong performance in single-turn tasks, but extending it to multi-turn interaction remains challenging due to sparse rewards and poor per-turn credit assignment.
By Naifan Zhang, Ruihan Sun, Jinwei Su, Hengjie Yang, Zhengyuan Pan, Zhaohan Chen, Xiaofan Zhang
arXiv:2607. 00946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While prior work has explored emotion control in hybrid text-to-speech systems, the geometric properties of these modules, and their implications for steerability, remain poorly understood.
By Siyi Wang, James Bailey, Ting Dang