Acoustic scattering AI for non-invasive object classifications: A case study on hair assessment

This paper presents a novel non-invasive object classification approach using acoustic scattering, demonstrated through a case study on hair assessment. When an incident wave interacts with an object, it generates a scattered acoustic field encoding structural and material properties. By emitting acoustic stimuli and capturing the scattered signals from head-with-hair-sample objects, we classify hair type and moisture using AI-driven, deep-learning-based sound classification. We benchmark comprehensive methods, including (i) fully supervised deep learning, (ii) embedding-based classification, (iii) supervised foundation model fine-tuning, and (iv) self-supervised model fine-tuning. Our best strategy achieves nearly 90% classification accuracy by fine-tuning all parameters of a self-supervised model. These results highlight acoustic scattering as a privacy-preserving, non-contact alternative to visual classification, opening huge potential for applications in various industries.

Pushing the Performance of Synthetic Speech Detection with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks and Self-Supervised Learning Models

Recent advancements in speech synthesis technologies have led to increasingly advanced spoofing attacks, posing significant challenges for automatic speaker verification systems. While systems based on self-supervised learning (SSL) models, particularly the XLSR-Conformer model, have demonstrated remarkable performance in synthetic speech detection, there remains room for architectural improvements. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that replaces the traditional Multi-Layer Perceptron in the XLSR-Conformer model with a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), a novel architecture based on the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. Our results on ASVspoof2021 demonstrate that integrating KAN into the SSL-based models can improve the performance by 60.55% relatively on LA and DF sets, further achieving 0.70% EER on the 21LA set. These findings suggest that incorporating KAN into SSL-based models is a promising direction for advances in synthetic speech detection.

Qwen vs. Gemma Integration with Whisper: A Comparative Study in Multilingual SpeechLLM Systems

This paper presents our system for the MLC-SLM Challenge 2025, focusing on multilingual speech recognition and language modeling with large language models (LLMs). Our approach combines a fine-tuned Whisper-large-v3 encoder with efficient projector architectures and various decoder configurations. We employ a three-stage training methodology that progressively optimizes the encoder, projector, and LLM components. Our system achieves competitive performance with a private test average WER/CER result of 16.63% using the Gemma3-12B and 18.6% using the Qwen2.5-7B as decoder-only language model.