The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.
By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
arXiv:2608. 06300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speaking assessment systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings to mark second language (L2) learners' speaking tests, making it critical to show that their scores depend on speaking proficiency rather than irrelevant speaker attributes such as first language (L1) or age.
By Arya Labroo, Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill
arXiv:2609.10434v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-supervised speech foundation models are now used in a wide array of downstream applications, including traditional speech recognition and as the b...
By Robin Huo, Ewan Dunbar
arXiv:2607. 03806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio foundation models are widely adopted as general-purpose feature extractors, yet the internal structure of their learned representations remains insufficiently understood.
By H\'ector Martel, Joe Hennessy-Priest, Taemin Cho
arXiv:2606. 10029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models increasingly serve as the backbone of text-to-speech (TTS) systems, yet we understand little about the representations they build when text and generated speech tokens share a single residual stream.
By Nikita Koriagin, Georgii Aparin, Nikita Balagansky, Daniil Gavrilov
arXiv:2512. 20978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Model (LM)-based generative modeling has emerged as a promising direction for TSE, offering potential for improved generalization and high-fidelity speech.
By Haoyang Li, Xuyi Zhuang, Azmat Adnan, Ye Ni, Wei Rao, Shreyas Gopal, Eng Siong Chng, Boon Siew Han, Yuanjin Zheng