CantoASR: Prosody-Aware ASR-LALM Collaboration for Low-Resource Cantonese

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is critical for language accessibility, yet low-resource Cantonese remains challenging due to limited annotated data, six lexical tones, tone sandhi, and accent variation. Existing ASR models, such as Whisper, often suffer from high word error rates. Large audio-language models (LALMs), in contrast, can leverage broader contextual reasoning but still require explicit tonal and prosodic acoustic cues. We introduce CantoASR, a collaborative ASR-LALM error correction framework that integrates forced alignment for acoustic feature extraction, a LoRA-finetuned Whisper for improved tone discrimination, and an instruction-tuned Qwen-Audio for prosody-aware correction. Evaluations on spontaneous Cantonese data show substantial CER gains over Whisper-Large-V3. These findings suggest that integrating acoustic cues with LALM reasoning provides a scalable strategy for low-resource tonal and dialectal ASR.

MATP-BENCH: Can MLLM Be a Good Automated Theorem Prover for Multimodal Problems?

Numerous theorems, such as those in geometry, are often presented in multimodal forms (e.g., diagrams). Humans benefit from visual reasoning in such settings, using diagrams to gain intuition and guide the proof process. Modern Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving a wide range of mathematical problems. However, the potential of MLLMs as Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs), specifically in the multimodal domain, remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce the Multimodal Automated Theorem Proving benchmark (MATP-BENCH), a new Multimodal, Multi-level, and Multi-language benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs in this role as multimodal automated theorem provers. MATP-BENCH consists of 1056 multimodal theorems drawn from high school, university, and competition-level mathematics. All these multimodal problems are accompanied by formalizations in Lean 4, Coq and Isabelle, thus making the benchmark compatible with a wide range of theorem-proving frameworks. MATP-BENCH requires models to integrate sophisticated visual understanding with mastery of a broad spectrum of mathematical knowledge and rigorous symbolic reasoning to generate formal proofs. We use MATP-BENCH to evaluate a variety of advanced multimodal language models. Existing methods can only solve a limited number of the MATP-BENCH problems, indicating that this benchmark poses an open challenge for research on automated theorem proving.