ZONOS2 Technical Report

We present ZONOS2 8B, our latest TTS model, which achieves state-of-the-art naturalness, prosody, and voice cloning fidelity. We improve upon Zonos-v0.1 across scale, data, and training recipe. We scale the model from 1.6B to 8B total parameters (900M active) with a novel mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone, improving inference latency and throughput. We expand our training corpus from 200K to over 6M hours using a new data processing pipeline, and we simplify our post-training and conditioning recipes to improve naturalness and voice cloning fidelity. We evaluate ZONOS2 8B on quality, speaker similarity, WER, and ZTTS1-Eval, our novel TTS benchmark, where it performs competitively with state-of-the-art systems while maintaining good streaming latency. We release our model weights and example inference code under an Apache 2.0 license on GitHub and Hugging Face.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: How and why deep learning for ARC

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC-AGI) presents a formidable challenge for AI systems. Despite the typically low performance on ARC, the deep learning paradigm remains the most effective known strategy for generating skillful (state-of-the-art) neural networks (NN) across varied modalities and tasks in vision, language etc. The deep learning paradigm has proven to be able to train these skillful neural networks and learn the abstractions needed in these diverse domains. Our work doubles down on that and continues to leverage this paradigm by incorporating on-the-fly NN training at test time. We demonstrate that fully committing to deep learning's capacity to acquire novel abstractions yields state-of-the-art performance on ARC. Specifically, we treat both the neural network and the optimizer (rather than just a pre-trained network) as integral components of the inference process, fostering generalization to unseen tasks. Concretely, we propose a methodology for training on ARC, starting from pretrained LLMs, and enhancing their ARC reasoning. We also propose Test-Time Fine-Tuning (TTFT) and the Augment Inference Reverse-Augmentation and Vote (AIRV) as effective test-time techniques. We are the first to propose and show deep learning can be used effectively for ARC, showing boosts of up to 260% in accuracy with AIRV and a further 300% boost with TTFT. An early version of this approach secured first place in the 2023 ARCathon competition, while the final version achieved the current best score on the ARC private test-set (58%). Our findings highlight the key ingredients of a robust reasoning system in unfamiliar domains, underscoring the central mechanisms that improve broad perceptual reasoning.

SER Evals: In-domain and Out-of-domain Benchmarking for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has made significant strides with the advent of powerful self-supervised learning (SSL) models. However, the generalization of these models to diverse languages and emotional expressions remains a challenge. We propose a large-scale benchmark to evaluate the robustness and adaptability of state-of-the-art SER models in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Our benchmark includes a diverse set of multilingual datasets, focusing on less commonly used corpora to assess generalization to new data. We employ logit adjustment to account for varying class distributions and establish a single dataset cluster for systematic evaluation. Surprisingly, we find that the Whisper model, primarily designed for automatic speech recognition, outperforms dedicated SSL models in cross-lingual SER. Our results highlight the need for more robust and generalizable SER models, and our benchmark serves as a valuable resource to drive future research in this direction.

Towards Generalizable SER: Soft Labeling and Data Augmentation for Modeling Temporal Emotion Shifts in Large-Scale Multilingual Speech

Recognizing emotions in spoken communication is crucial for advanced human-machine interaction. Current emotion detection methodologies often display biases when applied cross-corpus. To address this, our study amalgamates 16 diverse datasets, resulting in 375 hours of data across languages like English, Chinese, and Japanese. We propose a soft labeling system to capture gradational emotional intensities. Using the Whisper encoder and data augmentation methods inspired by contrastive learning, our method emphasizes the temporal dynamics of emotions. Our validation on four multilingual datasets demonstrates notable zero-shot generalization. We publish our open source model weights and initial promising results after fine-tuning on Hume-Prosody.