Towards Responsible Evaluation for Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) technology have enabled systems to produce human-indistinguishable speech, bringing benefits across accessibility, content creation, and human-computer interaction. However, current evaluation practices are increasingly inadequate for capturing the full range of capabilities, limitations, and societal implications. This position paper introduces the concept of Responsible Evaluation and argues that it is essential and urgent for the next phase of TTS development, structured through three progressive levels: (1) ensuring the faithful and accurate reflection of a model's true capabilities, with more robust, discriminative, and comprehensive objective and subjective scoring methodologies; (2) enabling comparability, standardization, and transferability through standardized benchmarks, transparent reporting, and transferable evaluation metrics; and (3) assessing and mitigating ethical risks associated with forgery, misuse, privacy violations, and security vulnerabilities. Through this concept, we critically examine current evaluation practices, identify systemic shortcomings, and propose actionable recommendations. We hope this concept of Responsible Evaluation will foster more trustworthy and reliable TTS technology and guide its development toward ethically sound and societally beneficial applications.

Mind the Gap: Data Rewriting for Stable Off-Policy Supervised Fine-Tuning

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the standard tool for correcting this distribution mismatch, but large policy gaps lead to high variance and training instability. Existing approaches mitigate this issue using KL penalties or clipping, which passively constrain updates rather than actively reducing the gap. We propose a simple yet effective data rewriting framework that proactively shrinks the policy gap by keeping correct solutions as on-policy data and rewriting incorrect ones with guided re-solving, falling back to expert demonstrations only when needed. This aligns the training distribution with the target policy before optimization, reducing importance sampling variance and stabilizing off-policy fine-tuning. Experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent and significant gains over both vanilla SFT and the state-of-the-art Dynamic Fine-Tuning (DFT) approach. The data and code will be released at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/Off-Policy-SFT.

StreamMel: Real-Time Zero-shot Text-to-Speech via Interleaved Continuous Autoregressive Modeling

Recent advances in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis have achieved high-quality speech generation for unseen speakers, but most systems remain unsuitable for real-time applications because of their offline design. Current streaming TTS paradigms often rely on multi-stage pipelines and discrete representations, leading to increased computational cost and suboptimal system performance. In this work, we propose StreamMel, a pioneering single-stage streaming TTS framework that models continuous mel-spectrograms. By interleaving text tokens with acoustic frames, StreamMel enables low-latency, autoregressive synthesis while preserving high speaker similarity and naturalness. Experiments on LibriSpeech demonstrate that StreamMel outperforms existing streaming TTS baselines in both quality and latency. It even achieves performance comparable to offline systems while supporting efficient real-time generation, showcasing broad prospects for integration with real-time speech large language models. Audio samples are available at: https://aka.ms/StreamMel.

RA-CLAP: Relation-Augmented Emotional Speaking Style Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining For Speech Retrieval

The Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model has demonstrated excellent performance in general audio description-related tasks, such as audio retrieval. However, in the emerging field of emotional speaking style description (ESSD), cross-modal contrastive pretraining remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel speech retrieval task called emotional speaking style retrieval (ESSR), and ESS-CLAP, an emotional speaking style CLAP model tailored for learning relationship between speech and natural language descriptions. In addition, we further propose relation-augmented CLAP (RA-CLAP) to address the limitation of traditional methods that assume a strict binary relationship between caption and audio. The model leverages self-distillation to learn the potential local matching relationships between speech and descriptions, thereby enhancing generalization ability. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of RA-CLAP, providing valuable reference in ESSD.

Chinese-LiPS: A Chinese audio-visual speech recognition dataset with Lip-reading and Presentation Slides

Incorporating visual modalities to assist Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks has led to significant improvements. However, existing Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) datasets and methods typically rely solely on lip-reading information or speaking contextual video, neglecting the potential of combining these different valuable visual cues within the speaking context. In this paper, we release a multimodal Chinese AVSR dataset, Chinese-LiPS, comprising 100 hours of speech, video, and corresponding manual transcription, with the visual modality encompassing both lip-reading information and the presentation slides used by the speaker. Based on Chinese-LiPS, we develop a simple yet effective pipeline, LiPS-AVSR, which leverages both lip-reading and presentation slide information as visual modalities for AVSR tasks. Experiments show that lip-reading and presentation slide information improve ASR performance by approximately 8\% and 25\%, respectively, with a combined performance improvement of about 35\%. The dataset is available at https://kiri0824.github.io/Chinese-LiPS/

SeniorTalk: A Chinese Conversation Dataset with Rich Annotations for Super-Aged Seniors

While voice technologies increasingly serve aging populations, current systems exhibit significant performance gaps due to inadequate training data capturing elderly-specific vocal characteristics like presbyphonia and dialectal variations. The limited data available on super-aged individuals in existing elderly speech datasets, coupled with overly simple recording styles and annotation dimensions, exacerbates this issue. To address the critical scarcity of speech data from individuals aged 75 and above, we introduce SeniorTalk, a carefully annotated Chinese spoken dialogue dataset. This dataset contains 55.53 hours of speech from 101 natural conversations involving 202 participants, ensuring a strategic balance across gender, region, and age. Through detailed annotation across multiple dimensions, it can support a wide range of speech tasks. We perform extensive experiments on speaker verification, speaker diarization, speech recognition, and speech editing tasks, offering crucial insights for the development of speech technologies targeting this age group.

CS-Dialogue: A 104-Hour Dataset of Spontaneous Mandarin-English Code-Switching Dialogues for Speech Recognition

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single conversation, presents significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Existing Mandarin-English code-switching datasets often suffer from limitations in size, spontaneity, and the lack of full-length dialogue recordings with transcriptions, hindering the development of robust ASR models for real-world conversational scenarios. This paper introduces CS-Dialogue, a novel large-scale Mandarin-English code-switching speech dataset comprising 104 hours of spontaneous conversations from 200 speakers. Unlike previous datasets, CS-Dialogue provides full-length dialogue recordings with complete transcriptions, capturing naturalistic code-switching patterns in continuous speech. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, present detailed statistics of the dataset, and establish benchmark ASR performance using state-of-the-art models. Our experiments, using Transformer, Conformer, and Branchformer, demonstrate the challenges of code-switching ASR, and show that existing pre-trained models such as Whisper still have the space to improve. The CS-Dialogue dataset will be made freely available for all academic purposes.

MusicEval: A Generative Music Corpus with Expert Ratings for Automatic Text-to-Music Evaluation

The technology for generating music from textual descriptions has seen rapid advancements. However, evaluating text-to-music (TTM) systems remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the difficulty of balancing performance and cost with existing objective and subjective evaluation methods. In this paper, we propose an automatic assessment task for TTM models to align with human perception. To address the TTM evaluation challenges posed by the professional requirements of music evaluation and the complexity of the relationship between text and music, we collect MusicEval, the first generative music assessment dataset. This dataset contains 2,748 music clips generated by 31 advanced and widely used models in response to 384 text prompts, along with 13,740 ratings from 14 music experts. Furthermore, we design a CLAP-based assessment model built on this dataset, and our experimental results validate the feasibility of the proposed task, providing a valuable reference for future development in TTM evaluation. The dataset is available at https://www.aishelltech.com/AISHELL_7A.

SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents

Social agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can simulate human social behaviors but fall short in handling complex goal-oriented social dialogues. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across a variety of agent tasks. Existing DPO-based approaches for multi-turn interactions are divided into turn-level and session-level methods. The turn-level method is overly fine-grained, focusing exclusively on individual turns, while session-level methods are too coarse-grained, often introducing training noise. To address these limitations, we propose Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO), which focuses on specific key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior while minimizing training noise. Evaluations on the SOTOPIA benchmark demonstrate that SDPO-tuned agents consistently outperform both existing DPO-based methods and proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o, underscoring SDPO's potential to advance the social intelligence of LLM-based agents. We release our code and data at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/SDPO.

Enhancing Multimodal Emotion Recognition through Multi-Granularity Cross-Modal Alignment

Multimodal emotion recognition (MER), leveraging speech and text, has emerged as a pivotal domain within human-computer interaction, demanding sophisticated methods for effective multimodal integration. The challenge of aligning features across these modalities is significant, with most existing approaches adopting a singular alignment strategy. Such a narrow focus not only limits model performance but also fails to address the complexity and ambiguity inherent in emotional expressions. In response, this paper introduces a Multi-Granularity Cross-Modal Alignment (MGCMA) framework, distinguished by its comprehensive approach encompassing distribution-based, instance-based, and token-based alignment modules. This framework enables a multi-level perception of emotional information across modalities. Our experiments on IEMOCAP demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques.