The Eloquence team presents three methods for the Interspeech 2026 MLC‑SLM Task 2, a multilingual MCQA challenge covering 21 languages. They fine‑tune Voxtral‑Mini‑3B with LoRA and data augmentation, achieving 0.72 macro‑accuracy; they use multimodal in‑context learning on Voxtral‑24B to correct label bias, reaching 0.81; and they deploy a training‑free retrieval system with a voice‑anchored memory, scoring 0.68. All approaches surpass the official baseline.
By Jordi Luque, Lorenzo Concina, Marco Matassoni, Alessio Brutti, Filippo Vella
arXiv:2609.22452v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-context understanding remains a fundamental challenge for large language models, as excessively long inputs often lead models to forget salient in...
By Xize Cheng, Wenxu Jia, Chenyuhao Wen, Dongjie Fu, Zehan Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Tao Jin
EXAM$^2$ is a new benchmark for audio understanding that covers six languages and multiple modalities—speech, sound, music, mixed-audio, and visual images—providing 5,667 multiple-choice questions, 22,614 image instances, and 135,684 multilingual translations. It evaluates large audio language models (LALMs) and multimodal large language models (LLMs), revealing significant gaps in multilingual and cross‑modal performance. The authors also introduce Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion model that improves multilingual results by up to 12.4% and multimodal results by 21.7% over a strong baseline.
By Jiawen Wang, Xiaoxue Gao, Zi Haur Pang, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv:2606. 30682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in language--audio retrieval have been largely driven by contrastive dual-encoder architectures that align audio and text in a shared embedding space.
By Fengjie Lu, Chenang Jiang, Jiarui Hai, Helin Wang, Aaron Yee
arXiv:2608.23758v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent large audio language models (LALMs) have achieved impressive progress in audio understanding. However, existing evaluations remain lar...
By Jiawen Wang, Xiaoxue Gao, Zi Haur Pang, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv:2609.22214v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long multilingual conversational spoken question answering requires systems to balance long-range transcript semantics with sparse acoustic and speaker...
By Shangkun Huang, Junchao Hu, Huan Shen, Guoji Wang, Yingao Wang, Shaosai Li, Wei Zou, Yunzhang Chen