arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Asymmetric Classifier-Free Guidance for Target-Speaker ASR

The paper introduces asymmetric classifier‑free guidance (CFG) for target‑speaker ASR using Whisper, where a speaker‑conditioned branch predicts the target transcript and a speaker‑unconditioned branch predicts serialized multi‑speaker transcripts. CFG modulates the influence of speaker conditioning during decoding via a single guidance scale, which is first set globally on development data and then refined per utterance by a lightweight encoder‑based predictor while keeping the recognition model fixed. The resulting system yields up to 21.8% relative WER reduction over a condition‑only baseline and 5.6% over standard conditional decoding under domain shifts.

By Yiwen Guan, Jacob Whitehill
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Bridging the Gap: Converting Read Text to Conversational Dialogue

The paper introduces Prosodic Adjustment with Conversational Context (PACC), a deep‑learning method that converts read speech into natural conversational speech. PACC analyzes and modifies prosodic features—intonation, stress, and rhythm—using HiFi‑GAN for synthesis, aiming to preserve naturalness and intelligibility while keeping computational load low for real‑time use. Experiments show significant improvements in speech conversion, higher model accuracy, and better Mean Opinion Score (MOS) results, establishing new benchmarks for the task.

By Parshav Singla, Agnik Banerjee, Aaditya Arora, Shruti Aggarwal, Anil Kumar Verma, Vikram C M, Raj Prakash Gohil, Gopal Kumar Agarwal
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

BreathGRU: A Novel Semi-Supervised Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit Framework for Speech and Breath Segmentation for Respiratory Audio

BreathGRU is a semi‑supervised Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit framework designed to segment speech and breath events in respiratory audio. It combines acoustic feature extraction, bidirectional recurrent modeling, pseudo‑label refinement, and duration‑constrained Segmental Viterbi decoding to produce accurate speech‑breath segmentation. In evaluations against existing methods, BreathGRU achieved the highest breath event recall, lowest onset‑localisation error, and highest Mean Match Intersection over Union, outperforming large pretrained VAD models such as Silero.

By Sania Fatima Sayed, John W. Holloway, Reyer Zwiggelaar, Faisal I. Rezwan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

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

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