Rethinking Language Model-Based Generative Speech Enhancement in the Latent Space of a Neural Audio Codec

Language model (LM)-based speech enhancement (SE) has recently emerged rapidly using latent space features of neural audio codecs (NACs). In this paper, first, we present a unified framework covering six popular LM-based generative SE modeling paradigms based on discrete/continuous latent NAC features: discrete or continuous autoregressive (D/CAR) SE, discrete or continuous non-autoregressive (D/CNAR) SE, discrete diffusion (DDiff) SE, and continuous flow matching (CFM) SE. Second, we are the first to compare their performance in a unified experimental setup and synopsis with diverse intrusive and non-intrusive metrics, enabling a fair and comprehensive evaluation. Third, we propose a fine-tuning strategy with auxiliary losses on reconstructed speech to improve both intrusive and non-intrusive metrics. Trained and evaluated on URGENT 2025 Speech Enhancement Challenge data splits, all continuous-domain paradigms excel their discrete-domain counterparts. The overall best approach turns out to be CNAR. We further show that our proposed auxiliary loss fine-tuning strategy helps to improve DNSMOS, NISQA, PESQ, and POLQA consistently in all six paradigms.

StaticSegFormer: An Efficient High-Performance Semantic Segmentation Based on Static Structured Pruning

Structured pruning enhances the efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs) by eliminating groups of parameters during inference. Previous methods mostly reduce computational complexity (FLOPs), while semantic segmentation performance (mIoU) slightly drops. Accordingly, recent dynamic structured pruning methods aim at reducing the performance drop, while lowering the FLOPs even more. However, on the ADE20K and Cityscapes benchmarks, our study reveals that on a GPU platform such dynamic methods exhibit a surprisingly low frame rate far below a simple static approach, while having comparable results in mIoU and FLOPs. To address this issue, we propose a static structured pruning method for attention layers, that achieves both, a lower FLOPs and a high frame rate [fps] of the SegFormer network, the latter increased by up to 34% relative on the Cityscapes dataset, while having no mIoU performance drop at all. Our so-called StaticSegFormer method is strongest for small encoders and large images.

Adversarial Attack and Disturbance Detection by Hadamard-Coded Output Representations for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation

Conventional one-hot encodings often yield poorly calibrated models, being overconfident under attack, and letting entropy-based detection algorithms fail. Previous image classification works have demonstrated that Hadamard-coded output representations can improve adversarial robustness. However, attempts to integrate Hadamard codes into semantic segmentation fall far behind state-of-the-art models in mean intersection-over-union performance. Regarding object detection, such output encodings have not yet been investigated at all. Further, no prior art addressed intrinsic codeword inconsistencies or actually exploited intrinsic codeword redundancy. Accordingly, we first derive a novel decoding procedure for Hadamard codewords towards optimal class-wise probabilities, solving the underlying optimization problem by using the projection onto the probability simplex. Second, our optimization delivers a measure of prediction inconsistency. Third, we are the first to show how to exploit these inconsistencies for adversarial attack and disturbance detection. Fourth, we introduce HadamardNet, a framework employing Hadamard codes as output representations for semantic segmentation and object detection models and tasks. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation both on disturbances and adversarial attacks, achieving state-of-the-art perturbation detection performance for both tasks in only a single detection pass, while delivering equivalent or close-by reference performance on clean data.

Efficient Multi-View 3D Object Detection by Dynamic Token Selection and Fine-Tuning

Existing multi-view three-dimensional (3D) object detection approaches widely adopt large-scale pre-trained vision transformer (ViT)-based foundation models as backbones, being computationally complex. To address this problem, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) \texttt{ToC3D} for efficient multi-view ViT-based 3D object detection employs ego-motion-based relevant token selection. However, there are two key limitations: (1) The fixed layer-individual token selection ratios limit computational efficiency during both training and inference. (2) Full end-to-end retraining of the ViT backbone is required for the multi-view 3D object detection method. In this work, we propose an image token compensator combined with a token selection for ViT backbones to accelerate multi-view 3D object detection. Unlike \texttt{ToC3D}, our approach enables dynamic layer-wise token selection within the ViT backbone. Furthermore, we introduce a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy, which trains only the proposed modules, thereby reducing the number of fine-tuned parameters from more than $300$ million (M) to only $1.6$ M. Experiments on the large-scale NuScenes dataset across three multi-view 3D object detection approaches demonstrate that our proposed method decreases computational complexity (GFLOPs) by $48\%$ ... $55\%$, inference latency (on an \texttt{NVIDIA-GV100} GPU) by $9\%$ ... $25\%$, while still improving mean average precision by $1.0\%$ ... $2.8\%$ absolute and NuScenes detection score by $0.4\%$ ... $1.2\%$ absolute compared to so-far SOTA \texttt{ToC3D}.

DisContSE: Single-Step Diffusion Speech Enhancement Based on Joint Discrete and Continuous Embeddings

Diffusion speech enhancement on discrete audio codec features gain immense attention due to their improved speech component reconstruction capability. However, they usually suffer from high inference computational complexity due to multiple reverse process iterations. Furthermore, they generally achieve promising results on non-intrusive metrics but show poor performance on intrusive metrics, as they may struggle in reconstructing the correct phones. In this paper, we propose DisContSE, an efficient diffusion-based speech enhancement model on joint discrete codec tokens and continuous embeddings. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we formulate both a discrete and a continuous enhancement module operating on discrete audio codec tokens and continuous embeddings, respectively, to achieve improved fidelity and intelligibility simultaneously. Second, a semantic enhancement module is further adopted to achieve optimal phonetic accuracy. Third, we achieve a single-step efficient reverse process in inference with a novel quantization error mask initialization strategy, which, according to our knowledge, is the first successful single-step diffusion speech enhancement based on an audio codec. Trained and evaluated on URGENT 2024 Speech Enhancement Challenge data splits, the proposed DisContSE excels top-reported time- and frequency-domain diffusion baseline methods in PESQ, POLQA, UTMOS, and in a subjective ITU-T P.808 listening test, clearly achieving an overall top rank.

Noise-Robust AV-ASR Using Visual Features Both in the Whisper Encoder and Decoder

In audiovisual automatic speech recognition (AV-ASR) systems, information fusion of visual features in a pre-trained ASR has been proven as a promising method to improve noise robustness. In this work, based on the prominent Whisper ASR, first, we propose a simple and effective visual fusion method -- use of visual features both in encoder and decoder (dual-use) -- to learn the audiovisual interactions in the encoder and to weigh modalities in the decoder. Second, we compare visual fusion methods in Whisper models of various sizes. Our proposed dual-use method shows consistent noise robustness improvement, e.g., a 35% relative improvement (WER: 4.41% vs. 6.83%) based on Whisper small, and a 57% relative improvement (WER: 4.07% vs. 9.53%) based on Whisper medium, compared to typical reference middle fusion in babble noise with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 0dB. Third, we conduct ablation studies examining the impact of various module designs and fusion options. Fine-tuned on 1929 hours of audiovisual data, our dual-use method using Whisper medium achieves 4.08% (MUSAN babble noise) and 4.43% (NoiseX babble noise) average WER across various SNRs, thereby establishing a new state-of-the-art in noisy conditions on the LRS3 AV-ASR benchmark. Our code is at https://github.com/ifnspaml/Dual-Use-AVASR

ICASSP 2026 URGENT Speech Enhancement Challenge

The ICASSP 2026 URGENT Challenge advances the series by focusing on universal speech enhancement (SE) systems that handle diverse distortions, domains, and input conditions. This overview paper details the challenge's motivation, task definitions, datasets, baseline systems, evaluation protocols, and results. The challenge is divided into two complementary tracks. Track 1 focuses on universal speech enhancement, while Track 2 introduces speech quality assessment for enhanced speech. The challenge attracted over 80 team registrations, with 29 submitting valid entries, demonstrating significant community interest in robust SE technologies.

Engineering of Hallucination in Generative AI: It's not a Bug, it's a Feature

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is conquering our lives at lightning speed. Large language models such as ChatGPT answer our questions or write texts for us, large computer vision models such as GAIA-1 generate videos on the basis of text descriptions or continue prompted videos. These neural network models are trained using large amounts of text or video data, strictly according to the real data employed in training. However, there is a surprising observation: When we use these models, they only function satisfactorily when they are allowed a certain degree of fantasy (hallucination). While hallucination usually has a negative connotation in generative AI - after all, ChatGPT is expected to give a fact-based answer! - this article recapitulates some simple means of probability engineering that can be used to encourage generative AI to hallucinate to a limited extent and thus lead to the desired results. We have to ask ourselves: Is hallucination in gen-erative AI probably not a bug, but rather a feature?

OpenViGA: Video Generation for Automotive Driving Scenes by Streamlining and Fine-Tuning Open Source Models with Public Data

Recent successful video generation systems that predict and create realistic automotive driving scenes from short video inputs assign tokenization, future state prediction (world model), and video decoding to dedicated models. These approaches often utilize large models that require significant training resources, offer limited insight into design choices, and lack publicly available code and datasets. In this work, we address these deficiencies and present OpenViGA, an open video generation system for automotive driving scenes. Our contributions are: Unlike several earlier works for video generation, such as GAIA-1, we provide a deep analysis of the three components of our system by separate quantitative and qualitative evaluation: Image tokenizer, world model, video decoder. Second, we purely build upon powerful pre-trained open source models from various domains, which we fine-tune by publicly available automotive data (BDD100K) on GPU hardware at academic scale. Third, we build a coherent video generation system by streamlining interfaces of our components. Fourth, due to public availability of the underlying models and data, we allow full reproducibility. Finally, we also publish our code and models on Github. For an image size of 256x256 at 4 fps we are able to predict realistic driving scene videos frame-by-frame with only one frame of algorithmic latency.

Interspeech 2025 URGENT Speech Enhancement Challenge

There has been a growing effort to develop universal speech enhancement (SE) to handle inputs with various speech distortions and recording conditions. The URGENT Challenge series aims to foster such universal SE by embracing a broad range of distortion types, increasing data diversity, and incorporating extensive evaluation metrics. This work introduces the Interspeech 2025 URGENT Challenge, the second edition of the series, to explore several aspects that have received limited attention so far: language dependency, universality for more distortion types, data scalability, and the effectiveness of using noisy training data. We received 32 submissions, where the best system uses a discriminative model, while most other competitive ones are hybrid methods. Analysis reveals some key findings: (i) some generative or hybrid approaches are preferred in subjective evaluations over the top discriminative model, and (ii) purely generative SE models can exhibit language dependency.