FacEDiT: Unified Talking Face Editing and Generation via Facial Motion Infilling

Talking face editing and face generation have often been studied as distinct problems. In this work, we propose viewing both not as separate tasks but as subtasks of a unifying formulation, speech-conditional facial motion infilling. We explore facial motion infilling as a self-supervised pretext task that also serves as a unifying formulation of dynamic talking face synthesis. To instantiate this idea, we propose FacEDiT, a speech-conditional Diffusion Transformer trained with flow matching. Inspired by masked autoencoders, FacEDiT learns to synthesize masked facial motions conditioned on surrounding motions and speech. This formulation enables both localized generation and edits, such as substitution, insertion, and deletion, while ensuring seamless transitions with unedited regions. In addition, biased attention and temporal smoothness constraints enhance boundary continuity and lip synchronization. To address the lack of a standard editing benchmark, we introduce FacEDiTBench, the first dataset for talking face editing, featuring diverse edit types and lengths, along with new evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments validate that talking face editing and generation emerge as subtasks of speech-conditional motion infilling; FacEDiT produces accurate, speech-aligned facial edits with strong identity preservation and smooth visual continuity while generalizing effectively to talking face generation.

VoiceCraft-X: Unifying Multilingual, Voice-Cloning Speech Synthesis and Speech Editing

We introduce VoiceCraft-X, an autoregressive neural codec language model which unifies multilingual speech editing and zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis across 11 languages: English, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and Polish. VoiceCraft-X utilizes the Qwen3 large language model for phoneme-free cross-lingual text processing and a novel token reordering mechanism with time-aligned text and speech tokens to handle both tasks as a single sequence generation problem. The model generates high-quality, natural-sounding speech, seamlessly creating new audio or editing existing recordings within one framework. VoiceCraft-X shows robust performance in diverse linguistic settings, even with limited per-language data, underscoring the power of unified autoregressive approaches for advancing complex, real-world multilingual speech applications. Audio samples are available at https://zhishengzheng.com/voicecraft-x/.

Unifying Model and Layer Fusion for Speech Foundation Models

Speech Foundation Models have gained significant attention recently. Prior works have shown that the fusion of representations from multiple layers of the same model or the fusion of multiple models can improve performance on downstream tasks. We unify these two fusion strategies by proposing an interface module that enables fusion across multiple upstream speech models while integrating information across their layers. We conduct extensive experiments on different self-supervised and supervised models across various speech tasks, including ASR and paralinguistic analysis, and demonstrate that our method outperforms prior fusion approaches. We further analyze its scalability concerning model size and count, highlighting the importance of selecting appropriate upstream models. Our results show that the proposed interface provides an additional performance boost when given a suitable upstream model selection, making it a promising approach for utilizing Speech Foundation Models.

Probing the Robustness Properties of Neural Speech Codecs

Neural speech codecs have revolutionized speech coding, achieving higher compression while preserving audio fidelity. Beyond compression, they have emerged as tokenization strategies, enabling language modeling on speech and driving paradigm shifts across various speech processing tasks. Despite these advancements, their robustness in noisy environments remains underexplored, raising concerns about their generalization to real-world scenarios. In this work, we systematically evaluate neural speech codecs under various noise conditions, revealing non-trivial differences in their robustness. We further examine their linearity properties, uncovering non-linear distortions which partly explain observed variations in robustness. Lastly, we analyze their frequency response to identify factors affecting audio fidelity. Our findings provide critical insights into codec behavior and future codec design, as well as emphasizing the importance of noise robustness for their real-world integration.

VoiceStar: Robust Zero-Shot Autoregressive TTS with Duration Control and Extrapolation

We present VoiceStar, the first zero-shot TTS model that achieves both output duration control and extrapolation. VoiceStar is an autoregressive encoder-decoder neural codec language model, that leverages a novel Progress-Monitoring Rotary Position Embedding (PM-RoPE) and is trained with Continuation-Prompt Mixed (CPM) training. PM-RoPE enables the model to better align text and speech tokens, indicates the target duration for the generated speech, and also allows the model to generate speech waveforms much longer in duration than those seen during. CPM training also helps to mitigate the training/inference mismatch, and significantly improves the quality of the generated speech in terms of speaker similarity and intelligibility. VoiceStar outperforms or is on par with current state-of-the-art models on short-form benchmarks such as Librispeech and Seed-TTS, and significantly outperforms these models on long-form/extrapolation benchmarks (20-50s) in terms of intelligibility and naturalness. Code and model weights: https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceStar

Rhapsody: A Dataset for Highlight Detection in Podcasts

Podcasts have become daily companions for half a billion users. Given the enormous amount of podcast content available, highlights provide a valuable signal that helps viewers get the gist of an episode and decide if they want to invest in listening to it in its entirety. However, identifying highlights automatically is challenging due to the unstructured and long-form nature of the content. We introduce Rhapsody, a dataset of 13K podcast episodes paired with segment-level highlight scores derived from YouTube's 'most replayed' feature. We frame the podcast highlight detection as a segment-level binary classification task. We explore various baseline approaches, including zero-shot prompting of language models and lightweight finetuned language models using segment-level classification heads. Our experimental results indicate that even state-of-the-art language models like GPT-4o and Gemini struggle with this task, while models finetuned with in-domain data significantly outperform their zero-shot performance. The finetuned model benefits from leveraging both speech signal features and transcripts. These findings highlight the challenges for fine-grained information access in long-form spoken media.

VoiceCraft-Dub: Automated Video Dubbing with Neural Codec Language Models

We present VoiceCraft-Dub, a novel approach for automated video dubbing that synthesizes high-quality speech from text and facial cues. This task has broad applications in filmmaking, multimedia creation, and assisting voice-impaired individuals. Building on the success of Neural Codec Language Models (NCLMs) for speech synthesis, our method extends their capabilities by incorporating video features, ensuring that synthesized speech is time-synchronized and expressively aligned with facial movements while preserving natural prosody. To inject visual cues, we design adapters to align facial features with the NCLM token space and introduce audio-visual fusion layers to merge audio-visual information within the NCLM framework. Additionally, we curate CelebV-Dub, a new dataset of expressive, real-world videos specifically designed for automated video dubbing. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves high-quality, intelligible, and natural speech synthesis with accurate lip synchronization, outperforming existing methods in human perception and performing favorably in objective evaluations. We also adapt VoiceCraft-Dub for the video-to-speech task, demonstrating its versatility for various applications.

Scaling Rich Style-Prompted Text-to-Speech Datasets

We introduce Paralinguistic Speech Captions (ParaSpeechCaps), a large-scale dataset that annotates speech utterances with rich style captions. While rich abstract tags (e.g. guttural, nasal, pained) have been explored in small-scale human-annotated datasets, existing large-scale datasets only cover basic tags (e.g. low-pitched, slow, loud). We combine off-the-shelf text and speech embedders, classifiers and an audio language model to automatically scale rich tag annotations for the first time. ParaSpeechCaps covers a total of 59 style tags, including both speaker-level intrinsic tags and utterance-level situational tags. It consists of 342 hours of human-labelled data (PSC-Base) and 2427 hours of automatically annotated data (PSC-Scaled). We finetune Parler-TTS, an open-source style-prompted TTS model, on ParaSpeechCaps, and achieve improved style consistency (+7.9% Consistency MOS) and speech quality (+15.5% Naturalness MOS) over the best performing baseline that combines existing rich style tag datasets. We ablate several of our dataset design choices to lay the foundation for future work in this space. Our dataset, models and code are released at https://github.com/ajd12342/paraspeechcaps .

How to Learn a New Language? An Efficient Solution for Self-Supervised Learning Models Unseen Languages Adaption in Low-Resource Scenario

The utilization of speech Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models achieves impressive performance on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, in low-resource language ASR, they encounter the domain mismatch problem between pre-trained and low-resource languages. Typical solutions like fine-tuning the SSL model suffer from high computation costs while using frozen SSL models as feature extractors comes with poor performance. To handle these issues, we extend a conventional efficient fine-tuning scheme based on the adapter. We add an extra intermediate adaptation to warm up the adapter and downstream model initialization. Remarkably, we update only 1-5% of the total model parameters to achieve the adaptation. Experimental results on the ML-SUPERB dataset show that our solution outperforms conventional efficient fine-tuning. It achieves up to a 28% relative improvement in the Character/Phoneme error rate when adapting to unseen languages.

Dynamic-SUPERB Phase-2: A Collaboratively Expanding Benchmark for Measuring the Capabilities of Spoken Language Models with 180 Tasks

Multimodal foundation models, such as Gemini and ChatGPT, have revolutionized human-machine interactions by seamlessly integrating various forms of data. Developing a universal spoken language model that comprehends a wide range of natural language instructions is critical for bridging communication gaps and facilitating more intuitive interactions. However, the absence of a comprehensive evaluation benchmark poses a significant challenge. We present Dynamic-SUPERB Phase-2, an open and evolving benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of instruction-based universal speech models. Building upon the first generation, this second version incorporates 125 new tasks contributed collaboratively by the global research community, expanding the benchmark to a total of 180 tasks, making it the largest benchmark for speech and audio evaluation. While the first generation of Dynamic-SUPERB was limited to classification tasks, Dynamic-SUPERB Phase-2 broadens its evaluation capabilities by introducing a wide array of novel and diverse tasks, including regression and sequence generation, across speech, music, and environmental audio. Evaluation results indicate that none of the models performed well universally. SALMONN-13B excelled in English ASR, while WavLLM demonstrated high accuracy in emotion recognition, but current models still require further innovations to handle a broader range of tasks. We will soon open-source all task data and the evaluation pipeline.