arXiv AI
Oct 19

SpeechCritic: Learning a Diagnostic Speech Judge from Limited Human Preferences

SpeechCritic learns a diagnostic speech judge from only about 300 human-labeled comparisons, calibrating a frontier audio-language model with non-binding hints that select acoustic measurements agreeing with human judgments. The approach improves dimension-level agreement by 6.3 points and reduces mismatch in Tie rates by 10.4 points, and training a 7B judge with SFT, OPD, and RL yields distinct behaviors, with RL producing more specific rationales. The method works across language pairs, demonstrating a path from limited human preferences to a diagnostic speech judge.

By Mingyue Huo, Shivam Mehta, Bhavin Jawade, Yinghong Lan, Haoqi Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

The Limits of Reference-Free Speech Quality Metrics as Evaluators and Rewards on Modern Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2609.13150v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reference-free quality predictors such as UTMOS, DNSMOS and SCOREQ are the de facto automatic evaluators for text-to-speech (TTS) and are increasingl...

By Antonis Asonitis, Juan Pablo Zuluaga Gomez, Francesco Verdini, Aref Farhadipour, Marzieh Razavi, Pierre-Edouard Honnet, Vijeta Avijeet
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

HPRO: Hierarchical Progressive Reward Optimization via Preference Extraction for Emotional Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.28249v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, Large Language Model (LLM)-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) models have achieved remarkable naturalness. However, the standard Supervised...

By Sihang Nie, Xiaofen Xing, Rui Xing, Haoming Li, Ruitong Xiao, Jingyuan Xing, Baiji Liu, Xiangmin Xu