arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

LaSR: Context-Aware Speech Recognition via Latent Reasoning

LaSR (Latent Speech Reasoning) is a new training paradigm for context‑aware speech recognition that uses a latent reasoning trajectory instead of explicit intermediate tokens. It aligns chain‑of‑thought supervision around the acoustic region of target words and introduces latent reasoning periods for grounding context and guiding transcription transitions. Experiments on Fun‑Audio‑Chat show that LaSR improves terminology recognition without added latency and outperforms standard fine‑tuning baselines, demonstrating the promise of latent reasoning for efficient, context‑aware speech assistants.

By Heyang Liu, Ziyang Cheng, Jiayi Huang, Wenyang Xiao, Ronghua Wu, Qunshan Gu, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

What Did the MLLM Hear? Token-Level Spectro-Temporal Grounding for Audio MLLM Explainability

The paper introduces STAG, a post‑hoc framework that provides token‑level spectro‑temporal grounding for captions produced by audio‑based multimodal large language models (MLLMs). STAG estimates temporal support for each token via vocabulary projections of encoded audio, measures frequency‑band relevance through controlled spectral occlusion, and fuses these signals into a spectro‑temporal relevance map. Evaluations across ten explanation methods and four grounding benchmarks show that STAG achieves superior event‑localization performance on every dataset, and counterfactual deletion experiments confirm that removing the identified evidence selectively reduces model confidence and often eliminates the corresponding event from regenerated captions.

By Lucia Cascone, Valeria Fraenza, Michele Nappi, Fabio Narducci, Benedetto Simone
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

The Bairong System for MLC-SLM 2026: Dynamic Question-Aware Evidence Routing for Multilingual Conversational Speech Understanding

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

SITAR: A Situational Distortion Metric for Automatic Speech Recognition Evaluation

The paper introduces SITAR, a situational distortion metric for evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. SITAR aggregates situational severity and cumulative extent into a unified score using a bounded recursive formulation, and is implemented as a lightweight BERT-family regressor that requires minimal runtime cost. The authors validate SITAR through extrinsic and intrinsic protocols, showing it tracks capability scaling and provides diagnostic utility across diverse datasets and models.

By Mingzhe Lu, Jinhao Liu, Yunpeng Li, Hang Su, Lichun Fan, Jian Luan