arXiv AI
Sep 1

No Detectable Change in Side-Level WER from Prompt-Level Context: A Preregistered Ablation on a Production Oral-History Corpus

The study examined whether providing full prompt-level context to a large multimodal model would improve speech transcription accuracy on a production oral‑history corpus. Using a preregistered within‑item paired ablation, the authors found that adding context did not produce a detectable change in side‑level word error rate (WER) for either gpt‑4o‑transcribe or gemini‑2.5‑flash. The results suggest that context alone may not be sufficient to enhance aggregate transcription accuracy, and that finer‑grained, sequence‑aligned metrics are needed to evaluate such mechanisms.

By Theodore O. Cochran, Stephanie Dodson, Keith Nore
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

High-Value Synthetic Supervision for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of a Compact Japanese Speech Model

The paper presents a synthetic pipeline that converts Japanese care handoffs into six-field structured notes, using 182 synthetic audio clips to adapt a 1.47 B‑parameter audio model. Parameter‑efficient adaptation via rank‑16 LoRA achieves 97.7 % of the full‑fine‑tuning performance while training only 12.4 M parameters (≈0.85 % of the backbone). Both full tuning and LoRA outperform the unadapted model on a synthetic test set, demonstrating that a compact model can learn a narrow audio‑to‑structure transformation from limited synthetic data.

By Sidi Chang, Peiying Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Multi-Dimensional Prosody Judgment For Live Streaming Speech Synthesis

The paper introduces Live-ProsodyJudge (LPJ), a cost‑effective pairwise evaluator distilled from Gemini for assessing fine‑grained prosody in live streaming TTS. It identifies a flaw called verdict coupling, where multi‑dimensional scores collapse into a single preference, and proposes Decoupled‑Live‑ProsodyJudge (D‑LPJ) to eliminate this issue through masking and a span‑local GRPO strategy. Experiments show LPJ outperforms a single Gemini call in accuracy, and D‑LPJ provides independent dimension judgments, achieving high alignment with human top‑3 selections in a TTS candidate tournament.

By Zifan Guan, Longyu Lu, Junan Zhang, Zhizheng Wu, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

SURE-Challenge: Evaluating Speech Evidence Before Speech-LLM Generation

The paper introduces the Speech-Unsupported Rejection Evaluation Challenge (SURE‑Challenge), a benchmark designed to test whether speech‑LLMs should accept or reject audio inputs before generating answers. Using LibriSpeech‑derived transcriptions paired with first‑word question answering, the authors evaluate various noise and silence conditions, and compare a simple energy‑plus‑Whisper‑score rule against a Qwen2‑Audio front‑end. On a 474‑row test set, the rule rejects 196 of 204 unsupported inputs while preserving accuracy on supported data, revealing a pre‑generation error mode that answer‑only scoring misses.

By Mengzhe Geng