arXiv AI By Shreeram Suresh Chandra, Ashwyn Sharma, Liang Lu, Xiutian Zhao, Leda Sari, Bj\"orn Schuller, Berrak Sisman

A Benchmark for Controllable Speaking-Style Captioning in Audio-Language Models

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The paper introduces StyleInstructCaps, a benchmark for controllable speaking‑style captioning (SSC) in audio‑language models. SSC generates natural language descriptions of speech delivery, capturing paralinguistic attributes such as vocal timbre, prosody, and expressivity, and requires dimension‑specific style captions rather than a single undifferentiated description. The benchmark provides a dataset and evaluation framework that assesses metadata groundedness, hallucination, instruction‑following ability, generalization to unseen instructions and audio datasets, and speaker‑style consistency, and shows that instruction‑diverse training improves groundedness, controllability, and speaker consistency across nine state‑of‑the‑art models.

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