arXiv AI By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj

Heard but Not Heeded: Paralinguistic Information Encoding and Loss in Audio-Language Models

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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.

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