arXiv:2608. 06409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech language models are increasingly evaluated on paralinguistic tasks by the accuracy of prompted answers, but answer accuracy combines failures at different stages of the audio-to-answer computation.
By Linkai Peng, Baorian Nuchged
The paper presents an interpretable, fair, and accurately benchmarked automated system for assessing second‑language English speaking. Using a hybrid of feature‑based speech‑timing metrics and a large language model (LLM) fluency judgment, the system achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.818 with the ICNALE Global Rating Archive, outperforming 81 % of trained human raters. A controlled study shows that encoding pauses into the LLM prompt does not meaningfully affect fluency scores, indicating that the system’s fluency signal derives from measurable speech‑timing features.
By Eichi Uehara
The paper evaluates post‑training quantization (PTQ) for text‑to‑speech (TTS) models across multiple architectures using a unified protocol. It shows that reducing weights to 4‑bit per‑channel can significantly lower predicted mean opinion scores (UTMOS) and that even 8‑bit per‑tensor scaling can cause severe degradation, with the impact varying by model. A staged ablation identifies the sensitive components, and per‑layer GPTQ can recover performance to within 0.1 UTMOS, while real int8 and int4 kernels confirm the simulated results on hardware, demonstrating that each configuration must be validated on the target runtime.
By Se Un Park, Yutae Kim, Junyoung Park
The paper investigates how post‑training compression techniques—such as pruning, quantization, and distillation—affect demographic fairness in Whisper speech‑recognition models. It finds that pruning and INT4 quantization significantly widen word‑error‑rate gaps between demographic groups, especially for Black/AA and Asian speakers, while distillation tends to reduce these gaps. The study introduces a temporal‑taxation metric to quantify the increased correction effort required for marginalized speakers after compression.
By Srishti Ginjala, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Christopher W. Myers, Srinivasan Parthasarathy
arXiv:2606. 22790v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the tradeoffs between compute allocation and model performance for two speech processing tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Speech Emotion Recognition (SER).
By Vyom Agarwal, Mokshda Gangrade, Siddharth Pal, Jerry Wu
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