Abstract:Modern text-to-speech (TTS) is dominated by autoregressive (AR) codec language models, whose left-to-right decoding brings latency that grows with utterance length, error accumulation along the committed prefix, and an artificial generation order imposed on the Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) token grid. We propose Luna-TTS Family, diffusion-language-model-based TTS systems pretrained on 1 million hours of speech across Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean. The family is built by progressive adaptation of a pretrained AR text LLM, from causal to bidirectional and finally to block-causal attention, and comprises two variants sharing a single tokenizer, data pipeline, and 0.6B backbone lineage. Luna-TTS is fully non-autoregressive: it generates the entire RVQ token grid in a fixed number of parallel refinement steps, with zero-shot voice cloning and speech editing arising natively as infilling. Luna-TTS Realtime, derived by continual training, is autoregressive over blocks of 32 codec frames (1.28s) while denoising each block in parallel; it supports KV-cached blockwise generation and incremental audio delivery, achieving an end-to-end RTF of 0.0240 and 41.6 ms local first-block latency under the warmed serving protocol. An annealed fine-tuning stage adds explicit control over emotion and non-verbal vocalizations (NVVs), and a reinforcement-learning stage applies GRPO with policy ratios computed over the realized denoising trajectory. On Seed-TTS-Eval, Luna-TTS achieves the best results on all four metrics among compared open-source and commercial systems (0.73 CER / 79.7 SIM on test-zh, 1.49 WER / 76.8 SIM on test-en); on the harder in-the-wild CV3-Eval, it posts the lowest Mandarin and English error rates in our comparison. Against leading commercial systems, it achieves the best results on most objective, model-based, and human-rated metrics for NVV and emotion control.
Abstract:Multi-channel speech enhancement (SE) systems exhibit superior performance over single-channel methods but are constrained to fixed microphone array configurations. This restricts their real-world deployment across devices with diverse array geometries. While recent array-agnostic SE methods address variable microphone numbers and permutations, they largely fail to exploit explicit array geometry priors when available, missing a crucial cue for optimal spatial filtering. A Geometry-Aware Dynamic Convolution (Geo-DConv) framework is proposed, which explicitly leverages microphone coordinates to transform standard fixed-array SE models into robust array-invariant systems. Experiments are conducted on the recent real-recorded RealMAN multi-channel speech dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed architecture enables two widely used fixed-array models to adapt to array-invariant settings, with consistent performance improvements across diverse array topologies.
Abstract:Recent advances in speech separation (SS) have led to compact front-end models with small parameter sizes, yet their high computational cost remains a major barrier for deployment on edge devices. To address this, we propose TF-MoE, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that enhances model capacity with almost no increase in inference cost. Our method introduces dynamic expert specialization in time and frequency dimensions through alternating time-wise and frequency-wise MoE modules, each dynamically selecting experts per frame or mel band. Built upon a mel-band-splitting Conformer backbone, TF-MoE achieves strong performance on SS tasks under low-compute settings. Experimental results demonstrate that TF-MoE consistently improves separation performance under computation cost constraints, outperforming BSRNN by +3.8 dB SDR on Libri2Mix with comparable 4.1 GMACs/s inference cost. This positions TF-MoE as a promising candidate for edge-device deployment.
Abstract:The rapid advancement of generative audio models has outpaced the development of robust evaluation methodologies. Existing objective metrics and general multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle with domain generalization, zero-shot capabilities, and instructional flexibility. To address these bottlenecks, we propose JASTIN, a generalizable, instruction-driven audio evaluation framework that formulates audio assessment as a self-instructed reasoning task. JASTIN bridges a frozen high-performance audio encoder with a fine-tuned LLM backbone via a trainable audio adapter. To ensure robust zero-shot generalization, we introduce a comprehensive instruction following data preparation pipeline, incorporating Multi-Source, Multi-Task, Multi-Calibration, and Multi-Description data. Experimental results demonstrate that JASTIN achieves state-of-the-art Pearson and Spearman correlations with human subjective ratings. It consistently outperforms general MLLMs across speech, sound, music, and out-of-domain evaluation tasks without the need for task-specific retraining.
Abstract:Bootstrap-based Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has achieved remarkable progress in audio understanding. However, existing methods typically operate at a single level of granularity, limiting their ability to model the diverse temporal and spectral structures inherent in complex audio signals. Furthermore, bootstrapping representations from scratch is computationally expensive, often requiring extensive training to converge. In this work, we propose the Convolutional Audio Transformer (CAT), a unified framework designed to address these challenges. First, to capture hierarchical audio features, CAT incorporates a Multi-resolution Block that aggregates information across varying granularities. Second, to enhance training efficiency, we introduce a Representation Regularization objective. Drawing inspiration from generative modeling, this auxiliary task guides the student model by aligning its predictions with high-quality semantic representations from frozen, pre-trained external encoders. Experimental results demonstrate that CAT significantly outperforms baselines on audio understanding benchmarks. Notably, it achieves competitive performance on the AudioSet 20k dataset with 5 times faster convergence than existing methods. Codes and checkpoints will be released soon at https://github.com/realzhouchushu/CAT.
Abstract:Speech separation (SS) has advanced significantly with neural network-based methods, showing improved performance on signal-level metrics. However, these methods often struggle to maintain speech intelligibility in the separated signals, which can negatively affect the performance of downstream tasks such as speech recognition. In this work, we propose SLM-SS, a novel approach that applies speech language models to SS, aiming to enhance the intelligibility and coherence of the separated signals. We frame SS as discrete multi-codebook sequence generation, using Encoder-Decoder models to map quantized speech mixtures to target tokens. In addition to the autoregressive modeling strategy, we introduce a non-autoregressive model to improve decoding efficiency for residual tokens. Experimental results on the LibriMix dataset demonstrate that our approach shows significantly better preservation of speech intelligibility, leading to improved linguistic consistency in a variety of downstream tasks compared to existing approaches.
Abstract:While modern Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve high fidelity for read-style speech, they struggle to generate Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a specialized, low-intensity speech style essential for relaxation. The inherent challenges include ASMR's subtle, often unvoiced characteristics and the demand for zero-shot speaker adaptation. In this paper, we introduce DeepASMR, the first framework designed for zero-shot ASMR generation. We demonstrate that a single short snippet of a speaker's ordinary, read-style speech is sufficient to synthesize high-fidelity ASMR in their voice, eliminating the need for whispered training data from the target speaker. Methodologically, we first identify that discrete speech tokens provide a soft factorization of ASMR style from speaker timbre. Leveraging this insight, we propose a two-stage pipeline incorporating a Large Language Model (LLM) for content-style encoding and a flow-matching acoustic decoder for timbre reconstruction. Furthermore, we contribute DeepASMR-DB, a comprehensive 670-hour English-Chinese multi-speaker ASMR speech corpus, and introduce a novel evaluation protocol integrating objective metrics, human listening tests, LLM-based scoring and unvoiced speech analysis. Extensive experiments confirm that DeepASMR achieves state-of-the-art naturalness and style fidelity in ASMR generation for anyone of any voice, while maintaining competitive performance on normal speech synthesis.
Abstract: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.
Abstract:Sound separation (SS) and target sound extraction (TSE) are fundamental techniques for addressing complex acoustic scenarios. While existing SS methods struggle with determining the unknown number of sound sources, TSE approaches require precisely specified clues to achieve optimal performance. This paper proposes a unified framework that synergistically combines SS and TSE to overcome their individual limitations. Our architecture employs two complementary components: 1) An Encoder-Decoder Attractor (EDA) network that automatically infers both the source count and corresponding acoustic clues for SS, and 2) A multi-modal fusion network that precisely interprets diverse user-provided clues (acoustic, semantic, or visual) for TSE. Through joint training with cross-task consistency constraints, we establish a unified latent space that bridges both paradigms. During inference, the system adaptively operates in either fully autonomous SS mode or clue-driven TSE mode. Experiments demonstrate remarkable performance in both tasks, with notable improvements of 1.4 dB SDR improvement in SS compared to baseline and 86\% TSE accuracy.




Abstract:Achieving robust generalization in speech deepfake detection (SDD) remains a primary challenge, as models often fail to detect unseen forgery methods. While research has focused on model-centric and algorithm-centric solutions, the impact of data composition is often underexplored. This paper proposes a data-centric approach, analyzing the SDD data landscape from two practical perspectives: constructing a single dataset and aggregating multiple datasets. To address the first perspective, we conduct a large-scale empirical study to characterize the data scaling laws for SDD, quantifying the impact of source and generator diversity. To address the second, we propose the Diversity-Optimized Sampling Strategy (DOSS), a principled framework for mixing heterogeneous data with two implementations: DOSS-Select (pruning) and DOSS-Weight (re-weighting). Our experiments show that DOSS-Select outperforms the naive aggregation baseline while using only 3% of the total available data. Furthermore, our final model, trained on a 12k-hour curated data pool using the optimal DOSS-Weight strategy, achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming large-scale baselines with greater data and model efficiency on both public benchmarks and a new challenge set of various commercial APIs.