arXiv Machine Learning

CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering

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.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

EmoTra-TTS: Smooth Intra-Utterance Emotion Transitions for Speech Synthesis

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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

Controllable Affective Generation via Latent Vector Steering

The paper introduces EmoVec, a lightweight framework that enables controllable affective generation in large language models by steering latent vectors. EmoVec identifies emotion-specific directions from paired neutral and emotion-conditioned responses using contrastive activation addition, then refines these directions through task-specific debiasing and principal subspace removal. During inference, the refined vectors are injected into the final residual stream with static or scenario-adaptive scaling, allowing continuous control over emotional intensity without updating model weights, and experiments across three LLMs and eight emotions demonstrate improved emotional salience while preserving semantic content, fluency, and coherence.

By Xixian Yong, Siyuan Chang, Yingying Zhang, Xian Wu, Xiao Zhou
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Enriching Speech Emotion Representations with Conversational Context

The paper introduces ACERT, a module that incorporates a flexible-length window of conversational context to enhance Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). By capturing emotional evolution across utterances, ACERT outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on IEMOCAP, sets a new context‑aware benchmark on SAFE, and achieves strong results on MELD. Ablation studies attribute ACERT’s improvements to emotional and conversational continuity rather than speaker identity or acoustic conditions.

By Arthur Peuvot, Romaric Besan\c{c}on, Ga\"el de Chalendar, Bianca Vieru, Ioana Vasilescu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

EmoStance: Response-Side Affective-Orientation Control for Empathetic Response Generation via Emoji Weak Supervision

The paper introduces EmoStance, a method for controlling the affective orientation of empathetic responses in dialogue systems. It leverages weak supervision from multi‑annotator emoji distributions to create a latent control space that approximates listener stance, and uses a frozen instruction‑tuned LLM steered by continuous prefix embeddings. Evaluation shows a 62.2% decisive win rate over baselines, especially in contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

IndexTTS 2.5 Technical Report

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