VoiceTrace introduces a new benchmark, VoiceTrace-Bench, for hybrid speech retrieval that combines a textual query specifying "what" to retrieve with a reference speech specifying "who" to retrieve. The authors propose a two‑stage framework: VoiceTrace‑Emb, which learns unified audio‑text embeddings for efficient large‑scale retrieval, and VoiceTrace‑Reranker, which fine‑grains relevance by jointly examining query‑candidate pairs. Experiments show VoiceTrace outperforms existing methods on both traditional semantic speech retrieval benchmarks and the new hybrid setting.
arXiv:2606. 30682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in language--audio retrieval have been largely driven by contrastive dual-encoder architectures that align audio and text in a shared embedding space.
arXiv:2602. 12783v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spoken query retrieval is an important interaction mode in modern information retrieval.
arXiv:2602. 14612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Answering natural-language questions over multi-hour audio requires both event recognition and temporal grounding.
arXiv:2609.23307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a comparative evaluation of dense embedding models for semantic candidate-job matching in high-volume staffing workflows. Incomin...
The paper introduces STeReO, a reranker that orchestrates speech and text retrievers to aggregate evidence from heterogeneous databases. It addresses the scarcity of training data by curating a dataset of queries, mixed-modality evidence, and relevance rankings, then trains and evaluates the reranker in both single- and mixed-modality settings. Results show that STeReO effectively selects the most relevant evidence, leading to significant improvements in downstream question‑answering performance.
SonicCaps is a large-scale audio captioning dataset featuring approximately 15 million captions paired with 700,000 audio clips, created using the Qwen3-Omni multimodal language model. The dataset emphasizes diversity by generating around 24 captions per clip through structured prompt engineering and few-shot generation, covering main descriptions, rephrased variants, and semantic tags. Human evaluations rate SonicCaps higher than existing datasets, and training CLAP models on it improves audio retrieval and zero-shot classification across public and commercial benchmarks.
Existing speech retrieval systems rely on fixed similarity matching and cannot adapt to diverse user intents. We introduce INSPIRE, the first benchmark for instruction-aware speech retrieval, in which natural-language instructions dynamically specify relevance criteria, including semantic content, speaker identity, speaking style, environmental sounds, and their combinations.
arXiv:2609.22452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context understanding remains a fundamental challenge for large language models, as excessively long inputs often lead models to forget salient in...
Q2D-Web is a new large‑scale benchmark for agentic Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, featuring a 190 million‑document web corpus and 70 k machine‑reformulated search queries in ten languages. It supplies three sets of relevance judgments—agent citations, production rankings, and a combined set enriched with LLM‑based labels—to evaluate first‑stage retrievers. Experiments on 13 retrievers show consistent ranking across judgment sets but significant variation across domains, languages, and query types, and demonstrate that a carefully sampled sub‑corpus can approximate full‑corpus evaluation with minimal loss in Recall@1000.
arXiv:2607. 24799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models tend to hallucinate when answering domain-specific ques tions from scientific documents without prior fine-tuning.
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.
arXiv:2606. 14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of audio understanding tasks, yet they still struggle with complex audio reasoning.