Adaptive Federated Fine-Tuning of Self-Supervised Speech Representations

Integrating Federated Learning (FL) with self-supervised learning (SSL) enables privacy-preserving fine-tuning for speech tasks. However, federated environments exhibit significant heterogeneity: clients differ in computational capacity, causing straggler effects under unified fine-tuning, while diverse downstream tasks require different representation depths, making full-model updates inefficient. To address these challenges, we propose an adaptive federated fine-tuning framework with early exits. Lightweight prediction heads are inserted at intermediate layers of the SSL backbone, allowing clients to terminate computation based on local constraints and task requirements. We further introduce a layer-wise, depth-aware partial aggregation strategy to better utilize representations from different network depths. Experiments show that the framework reduces edge overhead, supports heterogeneous hardware, and maintains competitive performance in resource-constrained federated environments.

Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments

Audio-visual navigation enables embodied agents to navigate toward sound-emitting targets by leveraging both auditory and visual cues. However, most existing approaches rely on precomputed room impulse responses (RIRs) for binaural audio rendering, restricting agents to discrete grid positions and leading to spatially discontinuous observations. To establish a more realistic setting, we introduce Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments (SAVN-CE), where agents can move freely in 3D spaces and perceive temporally and spatially coherent audio-visual streams. In this setting, targets may intermittently become silent or stop emitting sound entirely, causing agents to lose goal information. To tackle this challenge, we propose MAGNet, a multimodal transformer-based model that jointly encodes spatial and semantic goal representations and integrates historical context with self-motion cues to enable memory-augmented goal reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MAGNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 12.1\% absolute improvement in success rate. These results also highlight its robustness to short-duration sounds and long-distance navigation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/yichenzeng24/SAVN-CE.

Localizing and Editing Knowledge in Large Audio-Language Models

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance in speech understanding, making speech a natural interface for accessing factual information. Yet they are trained on static corpora and may encode incorrect facts. Existing model editing methods localize and update facts in text-only LLMs, but do not account for continuous speech representations, or where knowledge is stored across acoustic or language modules, or their cross-modal module. We construct the first audio benchmark for knowledge localization and editing in LALMs and propose a speech-driven locate-then-edit framework. First, we use speech-aware causal tracing to localize layers and modules that support factual retrieval and then apply editing at identified sites. Experiments show that factual knowledge is jointly encoded in audio and text modules, and that audio editing yields more effective updates than text editing or fine-tuning, enabling fine-grained knowledge control in speech AI systems.

A Directional-Derivative-Constrained Method for Continuously Steerable Differential Beamformers with Uniform Circular Arrays

Differential microphone arrays offer a promising solution for far-field acoustic signal acquisition due to their high spatial directivity and compact array structure. A key challenge lies in designing differential beamformers that are continuously steerable and capable of enhancing target signals arriving from arbitrary directions. This paper studies the design of differential beamformers for circular arrays and proposes a novel framework that incorporates directional derivative constraints. By constraining the first-order derivatives of the beampattern at the desired steering direction to zero and assigning suitable values to higher-order derivatives, the beamformer is ensured to achieve its maximum response in the target direction and provide sufficient beam steering. This approach not only improves steering flexibility but also enables a more intuitive and robust beampattern design. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method produces continuously steerable beampatterns.

DTT-BSR: GAN-based DTTNet with RoPE Transformer Enhancement for Music Source Restoration

Music source restoration (MSR) aims to recover unprocessed stems from mixed and mastered recordings. The challenge lies in both separating overlapping sources and reconstructing signals degraded by production effects such as compression and reverberation. We therefore propose DTT-BSR, a hybrid generative adversarial network (GAN) combining rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) transformer for long-term temporal modeling with dual-path band-split recurrent neural network (RNN) for multi-resolution spectral processing. Our model achieved 3rd place on the objective leaderboard and 4th place on the subjective leaderboard on the ICASSP 2026 MSR Challenge, demonstrating exceptional generation fidelity and semantic alignment with a compact size of 7.1M parameters.

CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering

Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a single utterance-level emotion, collapsing affective diversity and suppressing mixed or text-emotion-misaligned expression. While activation steering via latent direction vectors offers a promising solution, it remains unclear whether emotion representations are linearly steerable in TTS, where steering should be applied within hybrid TTS architectures, and how such complex emotion behaviors should be evaluated. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of activation steering for emotional control in hybrid TTS models, introducing a quantitative, controllable steering framework, and multi-rater evaluation protocols that enable composable mixed-emotion synthesis and reliable text-emotion mismatch synthesis. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that emotional prosody and expressive variability are primarily synthesized by the TTS language module instead of the flow-matching module, and also provide a lightweight steering approach for generating natural, human-like emotional speech.

Robust Online Overdetermined Independent Vector Analysis Based on Bilinear Decomposition

Online blind source separation is essential for both speech communication and human-machine interaction. Among existing approaches, overdetermined independent vector analysis (OverIVA) delivers strong performance by exploiting the statistical independence of source signals and the orthogonality between source and noise subspaces. However, when applied to large microphone arrays, the number of parameters grows rapidly, which can degrade online estimation accuracy. To overcome this challenge, we propose decomposing each long separation filter into a bilinear form of two shorter filters, thereby reducing the number of parameters. Because the two filters are closely coupled, we design an alternating iterative projection algorithm to update them in turn. Simulation results show that, with far fewer parameters, the proposed method achieves improved performance and robustness.

A Unified Neural Codec Language Model for Selective Editable Text to Speech Generation

Neural codec language models achieve impressive zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) by fully imitating the acoustic characteristics of a short speech prompt, including timbre, prosody, and paralinguistic information. However, such holistic imitation limits their ability to isolate and control individual attributes. In this paper, we present a unified codec language model SpeechEdit that extends zero-shot TTS with a selective control mechanism. By default, SpeechEdit reproduces the complete acoustic profile inferred from the speech prompt, but it selectively overrides only the attributes specified by explicit control instructions. To enable controllable modeling, SpeechEdit is trained on our newly constructed LibriEdit dataset, which provides delta (difference-aware) training pairs derived from LibriHeavy. Experimental results show that our approach maintains naturalness and robustness while offering flexible and localized control over desired attributes. Audio samples are available at https://speech-editing.github.io/speech-editing/.

TTMBA: Towards Text To Multiple Sources Binaural Audio Generation

Most existing text-to-audio (TTA) generation methods produce mono outputs, neglecting essential spatial information for immersive auditory experiences. To address this issue, we propose a cascaded method for text-to-multisource binaural audio generation (TTMBA) with both temporal and spatial control. First, a pretrained large language model (LLM) segments the text into a structured format with time and spatial details for each sound event. Next, a pretrained mono audio generation network creates multiple mono audios with varying durations for each event. These mono audios are transformed into binaural audios using a binaural rendering neural network based on spatial data from the LLM. Finally, the binaural audios are arranged by their start times, resulting in multisource binaural audio. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of both audio generation quality and spatial perceptual accuracy.

Spatial-Filter-Bank-Based Neural Method for Multichannel Speech Enhancement

The performance of deep learning-based multi-channel speech enhancement methods often deteriorates when the geometric parameters of the microphone array change. Traditional approaches to mitigate this issue typically involve training on multiple microphone arrays, which can be costly. To address this challenge, we focus on uniform circular arrays and propose the use of a spatial filter bank to extract features that are approximately invariant to geometric parameters. These features are then processed by a two-stage conformer-based model (TSCBM) to enhance speech quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can be trained on a fixed microphone array while maintaining effective performance across uniform circular arrays with unseen geometric configurations during applications.