The paper introduces ABX-Accent, a benchmark for evaluating how well unsupervised speech representation learning models adapt to new accents. It uses the AESRC dataset with 10 English accents, each providing less than 10 hours of unlabeled data, and adapts the Zero Resources Challenge ABX metrics to these accents. A baseline model employing adaptive domain normalization to fine‑tune a Contrastive Predictive Coding model shows a 23.6% relative improvement on across‑speaker ABX scores compared to non‑adapted models.
arXiv:2605. 03297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: ASR systems based on self-supervised acoustic pretraining and CTC fine-tuning achieve strong performance on native speech but remain sensitive to accent variability.
By Van-Phat Thai, Aradhya Dhruv, Duc-Thinh Pham, Sameer Alam
arXiv:2609.17981v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-R...
By Mohan Shi, Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang, Eray Eren, Abeer Alwan
Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), have shown strong Automatic Sp...
The paper evaluates the robustness of DistilHuBERT for accent classification using speaker‑disjoint splits and cross‑corpus tests with L2‑ARCTIC and other English accent datasets. It finds a large performance gap between in‑corpus and external evaluations, indicating that file‑level tests overestimate accuracy. The study shows that balanced external‑data training performs best, while pseudo‑labeling with confidence filtering is insufficient under domain mismatch.
By Xu He, Homayoon Beigi
arXiv:2609.38887v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-time voice conversion (VC) systems commonly rely on pretrained speaker embeddings from automatic speaker verification (ASV) models. While effect...
By Mu-Ruei Tseng, Waris Quamer, Ghady Nasrallah, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna