arXiv:2607. 08409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based ASR adapted to regulated domains such as banking is bottlenecked by privacy: real speech is costly and legally constrained to collect, making synthetic text-to-speech (TTS) an attractive substitute.
By Shashi Kumar, Yanis Labrak, Hasindri Watawana, Sergio Burdisso, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Kadri Hacio\u{g}lu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv:2608.31035v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Codec-based text-to-speech (TTS) models make language-model post-training applicable to speech generation, but it remains unclear when learned perceptu...
By Joonyong Park, Jerry Li
arXiv:2607. 00152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Three of the most popular methods for training language models to reason look like three different tricks.
By Yong Yi Bay, Kathleen A. Yearick
The paper reports that fine‑tuned small language models (SLMs) can outperform large frontier models in annotating grammar concepts from learner–tutor transcripts. By training a 0.8B Qwen3.5 model on teacher‑generated data and embedding the annotation rules into adapter weights, the authors deploy an efficient end‑to‑end grammar mastery tracker that matches or exceeds the performance of 4B reference models and GPT‑5.4/5.6 on two human‑curated benchmarks. The lightweight model also cuts serving costs by about 16× and boosts learner engagement and key business metrics in an online experiment.
By Marjan Celikik, Ana Peleteiro Ramallo, Javier Morales
arXiv:2608. 03215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for flow-matching text-to-speech is complicated by deterministic ODE sampling: trajectory-level policy-gradient methods typically convert the ODE into an SDE and track per-step likelihood ratios, introducing stochastic perturbations and substantial overhead.
By Guanrou Yang, Tian Tan, Qian Chen, Ziyang Ma, Yakun Song, Zhikang Niu, Qi Chen, Wenming Tu, Haitao Li, Shan Yang, Xie Chen
The paper introduces Reward‑Tilted On‑Policy Distillation (RT‑OPD), a method that enhances acoustic grounding in audio‑language models by using a frozen teacher to generate a reward based on the contrast between token predictions with and without audio. This reward reshapes the teacher distribution for reverse‑KL distillation, encouraging students to rely more on acoustic evidence. Experiments on two compact students across three benchmarks show that RT‑OPD consistently outperforms vanilla OPD, and a 3B model trained with RT‑OPD achieves 72.72% accuracy on the MMAU benchmark, surpassing other 3B models and rivaling larger 7B and 8B models.
By Kaiyang Li, Shaobo Han, Yue Tian, Shihao Ji
The paper introduces Test‑Time Policy Optimization (TTPO), an approach that enables large language models to improve mathematical reasoning without relying on ground‑truth labels. TTPO uses majority‑vote pseudo‑labels and an asymmetric objective: it distills rollouts that agree with the pseudo‑label via On‑Policy Self‑Distillation and penalizes disagreeing rollouts with Grouped Reinforcement Learning. Token‑level selection further refines the process, down‑weighting already‑converged positions during distillation and penalizing only confident errors during RL. Experiments show that TTPO matches label‑supervised OPSD on five competition‑level benchmarks, boosts Qwen3‑1.7B from 38.0 % to 45.2 % in test‑time training, and achieves significant gains without explicit reasoning steps, while also generalizing well across tasks.
By Aozhe Wang, Zhengxi Lu, Jianze Wang, Shangke Lv, Ying Liu, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Hua Yang, Qianglong Chen, Yongliang Shen
arXiv:2610.24809v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Speech recognition in real time in far-field conversational settings still incurs significant errors. Identifying potential error spans during stre...
By Sankalp Parashar, Preethi Jyothi, Sunita Sarawagi
arXiv:2602. 18037v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs).
By Johannes Ackermann, Michael Noukhovitch, Takashi Ishida, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv:2609.26536v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In LLM-based speech translation, transcription-based chain-of-thought (CoT) suffers from a mismatch between reference transcripts used in supervised fi...
By Yanghe Dong, Wanting Huang, Weiran Wang
Consensus Group Relative Policy Optimization (C‑GRPO) is a new training method that distills Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding into a group‑relative objective, enabling text generation models to approximate MBR performance without the costly inference‑time sampling and scoring. C‑GRPO only needs a utility function and policy samples, avoiding the need for gold references or curated preference data. Experiments on WMT 2024 machine translation and XSum summarization show that C‑GRPO matches MBR decoding quality while reducing inference overhead and outperforming other reference‑free baselines.
By Yuki Ichihara, Yuu Jinnai, Kaito Ariu, Eiji Uchibe
arXiv:2607. 02460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training large language models (LLMs) without real-world interaction feedback or human-labeled supervision remains challenging, particularly in specialized domains where expert annotations are costly to obtain.
By Zhuowei Chen, Xiang Lorraine Li