arXiv:2609.40317v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While talking head generation has advanced rapidly, generating natural listener behavior in dyadic conversations, which know when to react, how to reac...
By Zikai Liao, Yumin Suh, Yi Ouyang, Yi-Lun Lee, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Zhaozheng Yin
arXiv:2608.16053v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Synthetic conversational speech has become an important resource for developing and evaluating conversational speech systems. However, existing dia...
By Pengcheng Wang, Sheng Li, Jiyi Li, Takahiro Shinozaki
The paper introduces Speech-Rewarded Style Planning (SRSP), a method that trains a text-based style planner using a frozen downstream TTS model. SRSP generates candidate style instructions from dialogue history and response text, optimizing them with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) where the reward is the teacher‑forced likelihood of target speech tokens. Experiments on an English subset of the ISCSLP 2026 CoT‑TTS corpus show that SRSP outperforms baseline LLM and target‑audio‑informed captioning approaches in speech‑style and emotion similarity, mel‑cepstral distortion, and contextual appropriateness.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates a more effective way to align natural‑language style descriptions with actual acoustic output, improving controllability and fidelity in conversational text‑to‑speech systems."
By Shiao Zhu, Lianbo Liu, Sizhen Lyu, Yuzhe Wang, Sheng Li, Takahiro Shinozaki
arXiv:2609.16396v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Negation is typically modeled through its linguistic realization, although spoken interaction is accompanied by tightly coordinated nonverbal behavior....
By Leon Hammerla, Patrick Schrottenbacher, Alexander Mehler
arXiv:2609.22697v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recently, text-to-speech systems have made significant progress in speech expressiveness and controllability. However, the speaking style of generated...
By Weizhen Bian, Sitong Cheng, Rongxiu Zhong, Jiahao Pan, Liumeng Xue, Boyi Kang, Shilei Zhang, Jinglei Liu, Yue Wang, Junlan Feng, Bei Liu, Wei Xue
The paper introduces a method called randomized intermediate guidance for training tandem speech-to-speech models, where a large language model (LLM) acts as a backend providing candidate responses while the user is speaking. Instead of simulating the backend’s guidance, the approach derives guidance directly from the conversation corpus, using target responses for informative guidance and randomly sampled responses to simulate irrelevant updates. Experiments on synthetic dialogues and 3.8k hours of real conversations show that this technique yields response quality comparable to LLM-generated baselines while improving natural turn‑taking and audio‑judge naturalness.
By Manato Yaguchi, Yotaro Kubo, Hikaru Asano, So Kuroki