When Does a Spoken Agent Have Enough Evidence to Act? The PACT-SLM Contract Test
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The paper investigates how to evaluate generative audio large language models (Audio‑LLMs) on known closed‑set tasks by separating the decision to call a generative model from the use of acoustic evidence. It introduces a controlled call‑decision framework where a policy can choose between a transcript label, encoder evidence from CLAP, AST, or WavLM, or a generative call to Qwen2‑Audio, Qwen2.5‑Omni, or MOSS‑Audio, and measures the impact of generative calls on accuracy. Results on the VocalSound dataset show that while transcript‑only accuracy is low (0.296), encoder‑based controls achieve high accuracy (≈0.85) without any generative calls, and adding generative calls yields only a marginal improvement (0.925 vs. 0.921).
arXiv:2608. 19515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged.
The paper investigates how to evaluate audio‑language models by separating the use of acoustic evidence from the need to invoke a generative audio model. Using a controlled call‑decision framework, the authors compare policies that rely on transcript labels, encoder outputs from CLAP, AST, or WavLM, and optional calls to generative models such as Qwen2‑Audio, Qwen2.5‑Omni, or MOSS‑Audio. Results on the VocalSound dataset show that while transcript‑only accuracy is low (0.296), encoder‑only controls achieve high accuracy (≈0.85) without any generative calls, and adding generative calls yields only a marginal improvement (0.925 vs. 0.921).
VoxReason introduces a listener‑free evaluation framework that measures whether a speech planning system’s delivery choices—such as pitch, energy, rate, pause, emphasis, and stance—are grounded in cited source records before any waveform is generated. The system outputs a source‑cited speaking plan and uses a deterministic verifier to check citation legality, slot agreement, unsupported states, schema validity, and counterfactual locality. Experiments on 1,440 source‑label cases show that simple slot accuracy can be misleading, while a 7B locality‑based repair model significantly improves plan‑slot accuracy and locality, and removing source records sharply reduces the grounded score. whyItMatters":"The framework provides a concrete, measurable way to ensure that expressive speech systems make source‑licensed planning decisions, addressing a source‑use failure that occurs before audio synthesis."
The paper introduces a pipeline that generates intent‑labeled, two‑channel conversational speech from relational event lists, enabling controlled synthesis of full‑duplex dialogue with 42 phenomena across eight families in English and Mandarin. By having an LLM author each event’s speaker, text, conversational act, and attachment, and then aligning and timing these events independently, the system produces diverse, realistic turn‑taking signals. Experiments show that models trained on this synthetic corpus achieve higher floor‑occupancy accuracy and better start‑speaking/listening F1 scores compared to models trained on prior data.
arXiv:2608.28916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly evaluated with word error rate (WER), yet many voice workflows depend on exact written values f...