The study examines whether audio language models encode distinctive phonetic features similarly when processing spoken versus written input. By comparing mean representations of minimal phoneme pairs across six models, seven features, and 15 languages, the authors find that only voicing in the Qwen2.5-Omni models consistently shows a shared directional representation after correcting for multiple tests. The results suggest that the model family, rather than its size, determines how phonetic features are represented across audio and text streams.
By Yuanhao Chen, Peter Chin
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
The paper introduces an Encoding Probe that reconstructs language model representations using interpretable features, addressing limitations of traditional decoding probes such as incomparable feature contributions and correlation effects. It evaluates this approach on text and speech transformer models, examining features from acoustics, phonetics, syntax, lexicon, and speaker identity. Findings reveal that speaker-related effects vary with training objectives and datasets, while syntactic and lexical features independently contribute to reconstruction, offering a complementary perspective on model interpretation.
By Gaofei Shen, Martijn Bentum, Tomas O. Lentz, Afra Alishahi, Grzegorz Chrupa{\l}a
arXiv:2603. 09714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While multi-audio understanding is critical for large audio-language models (LALMs), it remains underexplored.
By Chih-Kai Yang, Yun-Shao Tsai, Yu-Kai Guo, Ping-Le Tsai, Yen-Ting Piao, Hung-Wei Chen, Ting-Lin Hsiao, Yun-Man Hsu, Ke-Han Lu, Hung-yi Lee
arXiv:2608.30853v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: While automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have achieved remarkable improvements in recent years, performance disparities persist across differe...
By Ting-Hui Cheng, Line Katrine Harder Clemmensen, Sneha Das
DiscoPhon is a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate unsupervised phoneme discovery from discrete speech units. It includes 6 development and 6 test languages that cover a wide range of phonemic contrasts, and requires systems to generate discrete units mapped to a predefined phoneme inventory using only 10 hours of speech from an unseen language. The benchmark assesses unit quality, recognition, and segmentation, and provides four pretrained multilingual HuBERT and SpidR baselines that demonstrate current models can produce units that correlate well with phonemes, though performance varies across languages.
By Maxime Poli, Manel Khentout, Angelo Ortiz Tandazo, Ewan Dunbar, Emmanuel Chemla, Emmanuel Dupoux