Search: “speech-decoding”

Do speech foundation models really learn words?

Researchers show via residualization that later layers of HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 encode word identity and semantics independently of phonetic content.

The study argues that discriminative ability on words does not imply specialized word representations, since good word discrimination can be explained by phoneme encoding alone. By partialling out phoneme information using residualization, the authors show that later layers of HuBERT and wav2vec 2.0 encode words with reasonable fidelity independently of local phonetic content. Applying this disentanglement approach enhances higher-order linguistic information in word discovery tasks, informing analysis of speech foundation models used for recognition and speech tokens.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:47 UTC · 7d agoAI research

The Semantic Bottleneck: Leveraging Semantic Representations for Non-Invasive Speech Decoding

Researchers introduced Brain2Semantics2Text, decoding sentence meaning from non-invasive MEG brain recordings via a semantic bottleneck, improving on prior Brain2Text methods.

The paper proposes Brain2Semantics2Text, a non-invasive speech decoding method that maps sentence-level magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses into a semantic embedding space and inverts those embeddings into natural language. Motivated by evidence that high-level semantic representations are distributed across cortex and evolve on slower timescales, the approach targets meaning rather than phonemes or words, avoiding the need for word-level alignment. The authors report improved sentence-level results compared to prior non-invasive Brain2Text methods despite the low signal-to-noise ratio of neural recordings.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research2

Kraken: LLM-based Speech-to-Speech Translation via Low-bitrate VQ and Dual-path Source Conditioning

Kraken speech-to-speech translation model builds on Qwen3-8B with low-bitrate vector quantization and source-conditioned vocoding.

Kraken augments a pre-trained Qwen3-8B LLM with speech feature inputs and low-bitrate single-layer vector-quantized tokens trained to reconstruct SSL features. A separate token-to-waveform decoder, Autowave-X, is conditioned on source speech to improve non-linguistic transfer. Training used 150k hours of multilingual and multitask speech data. The model reportedly beats SeamlessM4T-Large v2 and Qwen2.5-Omni in translation quality and speaker/prosody transfer.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 16:41 UTC · 5d agoAI research1

Building and Evaluating Fixed-Voice Thai TTS from Synthetic Speech

Researchers distill a compact 82M-parameter Thai TTS from synthetic OmniVoice data, enabling on-device fixed-voice synthesis without reference audio.

The paper uses a large voice-cloning model (OmniVoice) as a synthetic data source to train Wayu-Paxa-TTS-Edge, an 82M-parameter fixed-voice Thai TTS student. The model achieves 68.2% Challenge-Set Keyword Accuracy (85.5% of Gemini 3.1), 91.4% pause precision, and CERs of 3.7% on Thai and 1.1% on English. It outperforms its teacher on pause placement and is open-sourced with its evaluation framework.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI research

ECHO: A Matched-Contrast Benchmark for Context-Sensitive Turn-Taking in Full-Duplex Dialogue

ECHO benchmark pairs identical-overlap Chinese dialogue examples with contrasting contexts, revealing most full-duplex systems bias toward yielding the floor.

ECHO is a paired diagnostic benchmark for Chinese full-duplex turn-taking that matches examples with identical overlap transcripts but contrasting preceding multi-turn contexts, one requiring Yield and the other Keep. It also includes off-talk examples for diagnosing unnecessary yielding and introduces pair accuracy, which grants no credit to constant-action policies. Experiments across multiple full-duplex systems show most exhibit a pronounced Yield bias, performing substantially better on interruptions than backchannels. The benchmark and metadata will be publicly released.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 15:58 UTC · 1d agoAI research

What Did I Just Say? Self-Listening for Full-Duplex Speech Models

Researchers propose Self-Listening, a full-duplex speech approach feeding realized model speech back as input to improve interruption recovery.

Full-duplex spoken language models can listen and speak simultaneously, but asynchronous text generation, speech synthesis, and playback cause mismatches between what a model believes it said and what the user heard. The paper defines the resulting recovery problem as anchor interruption and proposes Self-Listening, which interleaves user speech, model text, and played speech as input streams. The authors also release AnchorSpeech, a benchmark with homogeneous training and test splits tracking which ordered response items were actually spoken. Experiments show self-listening models achieve better anchoring performance than full-duplex baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

Domain-Incremental Learning for Multi-Channel Replay Speech Detection

First continual learning benchmark for multi-channel replay speech detection shows task-specific beamforming cuts catastrophic forgetting across 24 acoustic environments.

Researchers frame replay-attack detection for voice-controlled systems as domain-incremental learning over acoustic environments, evaluating a beamformer-based detector across all 24 environment orderings of the ReMASC corpus with five seeds. Naive sequential fine-tuning raises error rates on previously learned environments by 18.8 points, while elastic weight consolidation halves forgetting but loses plasticity and gradient projection memory is statistically indistinguishable from naive fine-tuning. A task-specific beamformer keeping one spatial front-end per environment significantly improves final and incremental accuracy, and the last environment in a sequence dominates final performance.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 08:03 UTC · 6d agoResearch1

Motion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue

Researchers introduce Motion-Omni, an end-to-end model generating speech with synchronized full-body motion, responding 5.4x faster than cascade pipelines.

Motion-Omni is an end-to-end framework in which a spoken dialogue model outputs facial expressions and hand, upper-body, and lower-body motion directly from the hidden states that produce speech, replacing two-stage cascade pipelines. Trained on 422,856 quality-ranked pseudo-labeled pairs (1,402 hours) with a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct backbone, Motion-Omni-Q7 matches its teacher cascade within 2% on reference-free motion metrics, achieves a 2.62% word error rate, and runs faster than real time (RTF=0.78). The authors also release the SwDA-500 dataset and the first public evaluation protocol for stochastic open-ended full-body spoken dialogue.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 27, 20:00 UTC · 20d agoAI research1

X-AuT: Progressive Audio-Encoder Compression for Speech LLMs with Cross-Scale Distillation

XPeng AI's X-AuT prunes speech LLM audio encoders, cutting Qwen3-ASR-0.6B error from 5.61% to 5.27% with fewer parameters.

X-AuT is a progressive compression framework for speech LLM audio encoders that selects layer combinations via short behavioral probes and restores pruned models using cross-scale distillation and LoRA finetuning while keeping the language-model backbone frozen. Compressing Qwen3-ASR-0.6B from 18 to 16 audio-encoder layers lowered macro-average error from 5.61% to 5.27% on ten Chinese-English benchmarks. A 14-layer model reached 5.75% error with 20.7% fewer audio-tower parameters, and progressive pruning outperformed direct pruning (5.75% vs 6.73%).

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research

How Lossless Is Lossless Speculative Decoding? The Role of Numerical Precision in Orthrus

Reproduction study finds Orthrus speculative-decoding trajectories match the reference model in only ~45% of cases under BF16, but 100% under FP32.

Researchers independently reproduced Orthrus, a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion architecture claiming lossless speculative decoding via intra-model consensus, testing exact trajectory matching on 1,190 prompts across 12 domains. Under BF16, exact matching occurred in only 45% of cases for the authors' checkpoint and 43% for an independently trained model, with matching probability strongly tied to reference-model response-conditional perplexity. Despite trajectory divergence, downstream lm-eval-harness benchmarks showed no systematic degradation, while FP32 evaluation yielded exact matching on all prompts.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

The 2026 PNPL Competition: Word Classification and Efficient Cross-Subject Generalisation in LibriBrain100

The 2026 PNPL competition releases LibriBrain100, a MEG speech dataset with 32 extra subjects, targeting word classification and cross-subject BCI generalization.

The 2025 PNPL competition on non-invasive speech decoding from MEG achieved F1-macro scores of 95.6% for speech detection and 73.6% for phoneme classification, built on LibriBrain's ~50 hours of single-subject data. The 2026 edition extends this with LibriBrain100, adding 32 subjects (~40 minutes each) plus ~80 hours of within-subject data. Two tracks target within-subject word classification at scale and cross-subject generalization with subject-specific fine-tuning shrinking from ~40 to ~20 to ~10 minutes, aiming at clinically feasible non-invasive BCIs for people with profound paralysis.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI research

Measuring benchmark optimization in speech recognition

Hugging Face examines how much speech recognition systems overfit benchmarks and how to measure benchmark optimization in ASR.

A Hugging Face post on measuring benchmark optimization in automatic speech recognition, analyzing how model improvements on benchmarks reflect genuine capability gains versus overfitting. It is evaluation methodology research with no direct security impact.

Hugging Face Blog·Aug 21, 00:00 UTC · 26d agoAI research

Large Language Models Develop Belief State Geometry In-Context

Probing six open-source LLMs on HMM-generated data shows belief states are linearly decodable (R² 0.83–0.99), suggesting in-context learning approximates Bayesian prediction.

Researchers prompted six open-source LLMs with data from 40 hidden Markov models selected for non-trivial belief structure and probed residual-stream activations for belief states (posteriors over hidden states). Belief states were linearly decodable with peak R² values of 0.83–0.99 across HMM/LLM combinations, spanning early to late layers. Patching and steering the probe-identified subspace preserved downstream prediction quality while control interventions degraded performance substantially, establishing functional relevance. The results provide representation-level evidence that in-context learning approximates optimal Bayesian prediction over a context-inferred generative model.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 16:17 UTC · 1d agoAI research

Encoded Early, Used Late: Where Transformers Begin to Act on an Inferred Partner's Expertise

Probing finds transformers represent an inferred dialogue partner's expertise in early layers long before it causally influences output.

Using ExpertCollab, a corpus of multi-turn research-planning dialogues between model-played personas at four expertise levels, researchers show that a partner's inferred expertise is most decodable in early transformer layers and decays to near chance before the network's midpoint. Counterfactual patching reveals that injecting the expertise difference at peak decodability barely changes a fixed late-layer readout, while injection past the midpoint propagates almost completely. The result bounds where readout or steering of partner-conditioned behavior must intervene, demonstrated on a single model with a synthetic corpus.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

AuK Technical Report: An Open-Source Foundational Model for Speech Generation and Editing

Open-source speech foundation model AuK unifies generation and editing, trained on 1.95 million hours, with distilled AuK-Flash achieving 4.5x speedup.

AuK is an open-source foundational model that unifies speech generation and editing through natural-language instructions and audio context, trained on approximately 3.03 billion instruction-audio instances and 1.95 million hours of supervision across five task families including generation, content editing, and acoustic editing. It combines a multimodal LLM for semantic conditioning, a VAE jointly trained on speech, general audio, and music, and a hybrid rectified-flow Transformer using dual-stream MMDiT blocks followed by unified single-stream DiT blocks. Post-training applies human-feedback preference optimization for editing and reward-based reinforcement learning for generation, and the distilled AuK-Flash performs 4-step inference without classifier-free guidance at a 4.5x wall-clock speedup. Source code and model weights are released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoModel release2

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled pure-autoregressive testbed shows task-specific validation losses rank image tokenizers differently, with I2T loss the most consistent signal.

Researchers built a controlled pure-autoregressive testbed and tracked task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They find losses should be analyzed per task because they exhibit distinct scaling behavior and rank tokenizers differently, and that the loss-performance relationship depends on the predicted token space. I2T loss, computed over a shared text vocabulary, correlates consistently with both generation and visual understanding performance after supervised finetuning. Case studies revisit the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size as tokenizer design axes.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:57 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

LACE: Layer-Wise Compression for Dynamic Frame Rate Codecs

LACE introduces layer-wise compression for dynamic frame rate audio codecs, cutting sequence lengths and speeding TTS inference while preserving quality.

LACE (Layer-Adaptive Codec Encoding) applies an independent compression step at each quantization layer of a neural audio codec, enabling layer-specific segmentation boundaries instead of shared ones. Union alignment and boundary anchor mechanisms keep durations consistent for downstream text-to-speech. On LibriTTS, LACE achieves a better rate-quality tradeoff than prior dynamic frame rate codecs and improves TTS inference efficiency at competitive synthesis quality. Code is released in the ESPnet3 codec recipe.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:46 UTC · 1d agoAI research1

Online Draft Co-Training for Speculative Decoding in Large-Scale, Long-Context RL Post-Training

NVIDIA researchers detail an end-to-end system for online draft co-training that speeds speculative decoding in large-scale long-context RL post-training.

The paper tackles scaling online draft co-training for speculative decoding in RL post-training, where rollout generation dominates cost. It extends packed, load-balanced zigzag ring attention to merge rank-local branch attention with causal main-sequence attention for context parallelism, and introduces TapChannel to transport target features across pipeline-parallel stages without changing the schedule. Experiments show co-trained drafts tracking the policy baseline with substantial rollout and end-to-end speedups up to 122B parameters and strong scaling at 256K tokens.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Training-Free Speech-Centric Omni Understanding with Frozen VLMs

Audio-visual understanding remains challenging because models must jointly interpret spoken content, visual events, and their temporal relationships. Existing omni models typically introduce dedicated audio encoders and rely on expensive audio-video-text training, tightly coupling omni capability to specific VLM backbones and potentially weakening their existing visual and reasoning abilities.…

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 6, 20:00 UTC · Aug 6, 2026AI research

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled autoregressive testbed shows validation losses must be analyzed per task, and image tokenizer choice affects joint multimodal text modeling.

Researchers built a pure-autoregressive testbed to study image tokenizers as the 'visual language' of unified multimodal models, tracking task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They found that losses exhibit distinct scaling behavior per task and rank tokenizers differently, and that I2T loss over a shared text vocabulary gives a more consistent loss–performance signal than T2I loss. Better reconstruction does not necessarily yield lower task-specific losses or stronger downstream performance, and tokenizer choice can affect text modeling under joint optimization. Case studies examine the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size design axes.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

Rethinking Heterogeneous System Disaggregation for Subquadratic Attention

SQD disaggregates LLM inference by quadratic versus subquadratic attention layers, improving energy efficiency up to 56% on heterogeneous systems versus GPU-only baselines.

SQD (SubQuadratic Disaggregation) splits decode not by operator type but by quadratic versus subquadratic attention, matching their distinct arithmetic intensity and memory footprints. For sparse attention LLMs it separates top-k selection (requiring full KV indexing) from top-k attention plus FFN; for linear and sliding-window models it separates dense attention layers from subquadratic layers plus FFN. On an adjusted 8xB200 heterogeneous proxy, tokens-per-joule improves 53% on GLM 5.2, 31% on Nemotron 3 Ultra, and 56% on Gemma 4 31B. A Rubin plus LPX analytical model shows 1.2x-1.5x tighter achievable latencies and up to 3.6x higher throughput versus attention-FFN disaggregation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 17:55 UTC · 5d agoAI research

FLAT: Resampling Image and Text into 1D Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal Tokens for Retrieval and Generation

FLAT jointly trains a multimodal encoder with text-to-image and image-to-text decoders, producing flexible-length tokens that hit 83.1 GenEval on T2I after fine-tuning.

FLAT (Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a pre-training framework that jointly optimizes a shared multimodal encoder with T2I and I2T decoders, combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross-modal generative objectives. It maps visual and textual inputs into a unified continuous 1D sequence space and uses nested dropout over prefix-K tokens for dynamic output lengths. A single pre-training stage supports cross-modal retrieval and generation (71.1 GenEval), with task-specific fine-tuning reaching 83.1 GenEval on T2I, 40.5 BLEU-4 and 138.6 CIDEr on MS-COCO captioning, and strong Recall@5 on MS-COCO and Flickr30K.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 14, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoAI research

Robust Coverless Linguistic Steganography via Sentence Embedding Space with Global Resynchronization

Researchers propose a coverless steganographic framework encoding messages as hierarchical clustering paths in sentence embedding space with a Global Resynchronization Mechanism for robustness.

An arXiv paper proposes encoding secret messages as hierarchical clustering paths in the sentence embedding space rather than token space, improving decoding stability against word- and sentence-level textual perturbations. A Global Resynchronization Mechanism (GRM) reframes variable-length bitstreams as discrete symbols anchored to semantic subspaces to prevent bit-slippage. Experiments show substantial robustness improvements while maintaining embedding capacity and resistance to statistical analysis.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 4, 10:22 UTC · 12d agoResearch

Pre-Whitening and BCJR Posterior Distillation for Bi-LSTM Detection in Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling

Study shows nested-window Bi-LSTM architectures do not improve faster-than-Nyquist detection; pre-whitening plus BCJR distillation cuts bit error rates.

Across roughly 260 controlled trainings, processing nested intersymbol-interference windows in separate recurrent branches never significantly beat a plain Bi-LSTM at matched parameter budgets. The authors attribute the limitation to the observation model rather than architecture, and instead pre-whiten inputs and distill BCJR soft posteriors into the network. With 3.4% more parameters, the method reaches 1.05x the BCJR bit error rate at compression factor 0.8 and 1.89x at 0.7, improving to 1.47x with a wider whitened window.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:07 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Continue, Adapt, or Yield: In-Turn Adaptation to Overlapping Speech in Full-Duplex Agents

Duplex Cue evaluation shows PersonaPlex full-duplex agents adapt in-turn to listener contributions in only 34.8% of collaborative cases versus 68.2% for humans.

The paper introduces Duplex Cue, an evaluation of in-turn adaptation in full-duplex voice agents that separates listener intent (backchannel, collaboration, interruption) from speaker behavior (continue, adapt, yield). Using 208 scorable pairs from 300 human-confirmed cues in unscripted English conversations, it compares recorded human responses with PersonaPlex continuations generated while replaying listener audio. Humans adapt within the turn in 68.2% of collaborative pairs versus 34.8% for PersonaPlex, which otherwise continues unchanged (42.4%) or yields (22.7%).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 17:46 UTC · 5d agoAI research

Why Is Video Still So Expensive? A Survey of Inference-Efficiency Mechanisms in Video and Audiovisual LLMs

A survey catalogs inference-efficiency techniques for video and audiovisual LLMs, mapping bottlenecks in sampling, encoding, token reduction, and LLM decoding.

This survey covers inference-efficiency mechanisms for visual and audiovisual video LLMs, reporting reductions in parameters, FLOPs, latency, memory, and token counts. It organizes methods by pipeline stage, covering frame sampling, modality encoding, connector-level token reduction, and LLM prefilling and decoding for systems built since late 2022. The authors compile accuracy-cost comparisons under shared host models and input protocols, identify gaps in audiovisual efficiency and standardized evaluation, and maintain a public repository.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

Training and Finetuning Multi-Vector Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face published a tutorial on training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models using the Sentence Transformers library.

Hugging Face's blog walks through training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models with Sentence Transformers. Multi-vector approaches store multiple vectors per document to support late-interaction retrieval. The post is a practical guide for developers building retrieval pipelines with the library.

Hugging Face Blog·Aug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoAI tools & infra1

Understanding the Impact of Model Pruning on Long-Tail Forgetting and Explanation Reliability in Medical Imaging

Systematic study finds model pruning causes frequency-dependent long-tail forgetting in medical imaging and that gradient-informed methods best preserve explanations.

Across two long-tailed medical imaging datasets, two CNN architectures, four pruning methods, and sparsity up to 95%, the study measures predictive performance, explanation stability, and faithfulness. Rare classes degrade earlier and more severely than frequent ones, while explanation reliability depends mainly on the pruning strategy, with gradient-informed methods degrading least. Mechanistic analysis ties explanation collapse to loss of class-discriminative gradients rather than vanishing feature activations, recommending class- and explanation-aware evaluation of compression.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:44 UTC · 9d agoAI research

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost·Sep 13, 17:02 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

ENCP: Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ENCP calibrates conformal prediction per navigation episode, giving step-level coverage guarantees for vision-language navigation agents despite within-episode dependence.

Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction (ENCP) rescales a nonconformity score by a VLN policy's residual confidence and calibrates one maximum score per episode, preserving step-level coverage of at least 1−α despite dependence among steps within an episode. Across four VLN policies and three nonconformity scores on R2R and REVERIE, ENCP meets all reported empirical step-coverage targets in seen-to-unseen evaluation. The model-agnostic uncertainty estimates can signal when an agent should defer to a stronger predictor or human assistance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:42 UTC · 1d agoAI research