TELEVAL: A Dynamic Benchmark Designed for Spoken Language Models in Chinese Interactive Scenarios

Spoken language models (SLMs) have seen rapid progress in recent years, along with the development of numerous benchmarks for evaluating their performance. However, most existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating whether SLMs can perform complex tasks comparable to those tackled by large language models (LLMs), often failing to align with how users naturally interact in real-world conversational scenarios. In this paper, we propose TELEVAL, a dynamic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate SLMs' effectiveness as conversational agents in realistic Chinese interactive settings. TELEVAL defines three evaluation dimensions: Explicit Semantics, Paralinguistic and Implicit Semantics, and System Abilities. It adopts a dialogue format consistent with real-world usage and evaluates text and audio outputs separately. TELEVAL particularly focuses on the model's ability to extract implicit cues from user speech and respond appropriately without additional instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that despite recent progress, existing SLMs still have considerable room for improvement in natural conversational tasks. We hope that TELEVAL can serve as a user-centered evaluation framework that directly reflects the user experience and contributes to the development of more capable dialogue-oriented SLMs.

BoSS: Beyond-Semantic Speech

Human communication involves more than explicit semantics, with implicit signals and contextual cues playing a critical role in shaping meaning. However, modern speech technologies, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) often fail to capture these beyond-semantic dimensions. To better characterize and benchmark the progression of speech intelligence, we introduce Spoken Interaction System Capability Levels (L1-L5), a hierarchical framework illustrated the evolution of spoken dialogue systems from basic command recognition to human-like social interaction. To support these advanced capabilities, we propose Beyond-Semantic Speech (BoSS), which refers to the set of information in speech communication that encompasses but transcends explicit semantics. It conveys emotions, contexts, and modifies or extends meanings through multidimensional features such as affective cues, contextual dynamics, and implicit semantics, thereby enhancing the understanding of communicative intentions and scenarios. We present a formalized framework for BoSS, leveraging cognitive relevance theories and machine learning models to analyze temporal and contextual speech dynamics. We evaluate BoSS-related attributes across five different dimensions, reveals that current spoken language models (SLMs) are hard to fully interpret beyond-semantic signals. These findings highlight the need for advancing BoSS research to enable richer, more context-aware human-machine communication.

GOAT-TTS: LLM-based Text-To-Speech Generation Optimized via A Dual-Branch Architecture

While large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis through discrete tokenization paradigms, current architectures exhibit fundamental tensions between three critical dimensions: 1) irreversible loss of acoustic characteristics caused by quantization of speech prompts; 2) stringent dependence on precisely aligned prompt speech-text pairs that limit real-world deployment; and 3) catastrophic forgetting of the LLM's native text comprehension during optimization for speech token generation. To address these challenges, we propose an LLM-based text-to-speech Generation approach Optimized via a novel dual-branch ArchiTecture (GOAT-TTS). Our framework introduces two key innovations: (1) The modality-alignment branch combines a speech encoder and projector to capture continuous acoustic embeddings, enabling bidirectional correlation between paralinguistic features (language, timbre, emotion) and semantic text representations without transcript dependency; (2) The speech-generation branch employs modular fine-tuning on top-k layers of an LLM for speech token prediction while freezing the bottom-k layers to preserve foundational linguistic knowledge. Moreover, multi-token prediction is introduced to support real-time streaming TTS synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that our GOAT-TTS achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art TTS models while validating the efficacy of synthesized dialect speech data.