Leveraging Cascaded Binary Classification and Multimodal Fusion for Dementia Detection through Spontaneous Speech

This paper presents our submission to the PROCESS Challenge 2025, focusing on spontaneous speech analysis for early dementia detection. For the three-class classification task (Healthy Control, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Dementia), we propose a cascaded binary classification framework that fine-tunes pre-trained language models and incorporates pause encoding to better capture disfluencies. This design streamlines multi-class classification and addresses class imbalance by restructuring the decision process. For the Mini-Mental State Examination score regression task, we develop an enhanced multimodal fusion system that combines diverse acoustic and linguistic features. Separate regression models are trained on individual feature sets, with ensemble learning applied through score averaging. Experimental results on the test set outperform the baselines provided by the organizers in both tasks, demonstrating the robustness and effectiveness of our approach.

Segmentation-Variant Codebooks for Preservation of Paralinguistic and Prosodic Information

Quantization in SSL speech models (e.g., HuBERT) improves compression and performance in tasks like language modeling, resynthesis, and text-to-speech but often discards prosodic and paralinguistic information (e.g., emotion, prominence). While increasing codebook size mitigates some loss, it inefficiently raises bitrates. We propose Segmentation-Variant Codebooks (SVCs), which quantize speech at distinct linguistic units (frame, phone, word, utterance), factorizing it into multiple streams of segment-specific discrete features. Our results show that SVCs are significantly more effective at preserving prosodic and paralinguistic information across probing tasks. Additionally, we find that pooling before rather than after discretization better retains segment-level information. Resynthesis experiments further confirm improved style realization and slightly improved quality while preserving intelligibility.

Revisiting Acoustic Similarity in Emotional Speech and Music via Self-Supervised Representations

Emotion recognition from speech and music shares similarities due to their acoustic overlap, which has led to interest in transferring knowledge between these domains. However, the shared acoustic cues between speech and music, particularly those encoded by Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models, remain largely unexplored, given the fact that SSL models for speech and music have rarely been applied in cross-domain research. In this work, we revisit the acoustic similarity between emotion speech and music, starting with an analysis of the layerwise behavior of SSL models for Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) and Music Emotion Recognition (MER). Furthermore, we perform cross-domain adaptation by comparing several approaches in a two-stage fine-tuning process, examining effective ways to utilize music for SER and speech for MER. Lastly, we explore the acoustic similarities between emotional speech and music using Frechet audio distance for individual emotions, uncovering the issue of emotion bias in both speech and music SSL models. Our findings reveal that while speech and music SSL models do capture shared acoustic features, their behaviors can vary depending on different emotions due to their training strategies and domain-specificities. Additionally, parameter-efficient fine-tuning can enhance SER and MER performance by leveraging knowledge from each other. This study provides new insights into the acoustic similarity between emotional speech and music, and highlights the potential for cross-domain generalization to improve SER and MER systems.

Semi-Supervised Cognitive State Classification from Speech with Multi-View Pseudo-Labeling

The lack of labeled data is a common challenge in speech classification tasks, particularly those requiring extensive subjective assessment, such as cognitive state classification. In this work, we propose a Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) framework, introducing a novel multi-view pseudo-labeling method that leverages both acoustic and linguistic characteristics to select the most confident data for training the classification model. Acoustically, unlabeled data are compared to labeled data using the Frechet audio distance, calculated from embeddings generated by multiple audio encoders. Linguistically, large language models are prompted to revise automatic speech recognition transcriptions and predict labels based on our proposed task-specific knowledge. High-confidence data are identified when pseudo-labels from both sources align, while mismatches are treated as low-confidence data. A bimodal classifier is then trained to iteratively label the low-confidence data until a predefined criterion is met. We evaluate our SSL framework on emotion recognition and dementia detection tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised learning using only 30% of the labeled data and significantly outperforms two selected baselines.

Cross-lingual Speech Emotion Recognition: Humans vs. Self-Supervised Models

Utilizing Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models for Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) has proven effective, yet limited research has explored cross-lingual scenarios. This study presents a comparative analysis between human performance and SSL models, beginning with a layer-wise analysis and an exploration of parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies in monolingual, cross-lingual, and transfer learning contexts. We further compare the SER ability of models and humans at both utterance- and segment-levels. Additionally, we investigate the impact of dialect on cross-lingual SER through human evaluation. Our findings reveal that models, with appropriate knowledge transfer, can adapt to the target language and achieve performance comparable to native speakers. We also demonstrate the significant effect of dialect on SER for individuals without prior linguistic and paralinguistic background. Moreover, both humans and models exhibit distinct behaviors across different emotions. These results offer new insights into the cross-lingual SER capabilities of SSL models, underscoring both their similarities to and differences from human emotion perception.

Large Language Model Based Generative Error Correction: A Challenge and Baselines for Speech Recognition, Speaker Tagging, and Emotion Recognition

Given recent advances in generative AI technology, a key question is how large language models (LLMs) can enhance acoustic modeling tasks using text decoding results from a frozen, pretrained automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. To explore new capabilities in language modeling for speech processing, we introduce the generative speech transcription error correction (GenSEC) challenge. This challenge comprises three post-ASR language modeling tasks: (i) post-ASR transcription correction, (ii) speaker tagging, and (iii) emotion recognition. These tasks aim to emulate future LLM-based agents handling voice-based interfaces while remaining accessible to a broad audience by utilizing open pretrained language models or agent-based APIs. We also discuss insights from baseline evaluations, as well as lessons learned for designing future evaluations.

Can Textual Semantics Mitigate Sounding Object Segmentation Preference?

The Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) task aims to segment sounding objects in the visual space using audio cues. However, in this work, it is recognized that previous AVS methods show a heavy reliance on detrimental segmentation preferences related to audible objects, rather than precise audio guidance. We argue that the primary reason is that audio lacks robust semantics compared to vision, especially in multi-source sounding scenes, resulting in weak audio guidance over the visual space. Motivated by the the fact that text modality is well explored and contains rich abstract semantics, we propose leveraging text cues from the visual scene to enhance audio guidance with the semantics inherent in text. Our approach begins by obtaining scene descriptions through an off-the-shelf image captioner and prompting a frozen large language model to deduce potential sounding objects as text cues. Subsequently, we introduce a novel semantics-driven audio modeling module with a dynamic mask to integrate audio features with text cues, leading to representative sounding object features. These features not only encompass audio cues but also possess vivid semantics, providing clearer guidance in the visual space. Experimental results on AVS benchmarks validate that our method exhibits enhanced sensitivity to audio when aided by text cues, achieving highly competitive performance on all three subsets. Project page: \href{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Sounding-Object-Segmentation-Preference}{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Sounding-Object-Segmentation-Preference}

Speech Emotion Recognition with ASR Transcripts: A Comprehensive Study on Word Error Rate and Fusion Techniques

Text data is commonly utilized as a primary input to enhance Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) performance and reliability. However, the reliance on human-transcribed text in most studies impedes the development of practical SER systems, creating a gap between in-lab research and real-world scenarios where Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) serves as the text source. Hence, this study benchmarks SER performance using ASR transcripts with varying Word Error Rates (WERs) on well-known corpora: IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and MSP-Podcast. Our evaluation includes text-only and bimodal SER with diverse fusion techniques, aiming for a comprehensive analysis that uncovers novel findings and challenges faced by current SER research. Additionally, we propose a unified ASR error-robust framework integrating ASR error correction and modality-gated fusion, achieving lower WER and higher SER results compared to the best-performing ASR transcript. This research is expected to provide insights into SER with ASR assistance, especially for real-world applications.

1st Place Solution to Odyssey Emotion Recognition Challenge Task1: Tackling Class Imbalance Problem

Speech emotion recognition is a challenging classification task with natural emotional speech, especially when the distribution of emotion types is imbalanced in the training and test data. In this case, it is more difficult for a model to learn to separate minority classes, resulting in those sometimes being ignored or frequently misclassified. Previous work has utilised class weighted loss for training, but problems remain as it sometimes causes over-fitting for minor classes or under-fitting for major classes. This paper presents the system developed by a multi-site team for the participation in the Odyssey 2024 Emotion Recognition Challenge Track-1. The challenge data has the aforementioned properties and therefore the presented systems aimed to tackle these issues, by introducing focal loss in optimisation when applying class weighted loss. Specifically, the focal loss is further weighted by prior-based class weights. Experimental results show that combining these two approaches brings better overall performance, by sacrificing performance on major classes. The system further employs a majority voting strategy to combine the outputs of an ensemble of 7 models. The models are trained independently, using different acoustic features and loss functions - with the aim to have different properties for different data. Hence these models show different performance preferences on major classes and minor classes. The ensemble system output obtained the best performance in the challenge, ranking top-1 among 68 submissions. It also outperformed all single models in our set. On the Odyssey 2024 Emotion Recognition Challenge Task-1 data the system obtained a Macro-F1 score of 35.69% and an accuracy of 37.32%.

Crossmodal ASR Error Correction with Discrete Speech Units

ASR remains unsatisfactory in scenarios where the speaking style diverges from that used to train ASR systems, resulting in erroneous transcripts. To address this, ASR Error Correction (AEC), a post-ASR processing approach, is required. In this work, we tackle an understudied issue: the Low-Resource Out-of-Domain (LROOD) problem, by investigating crossmodal AEC on very limited downstream data with 1-best hypothesis transcription. We explore pre-training and fine-tuning strategies and uncover an ASR domain discrepancy phenomenon, shedding light on appropriate training schemes for LROOD data. Moreover, we propose the incorporation of discrete speech units to align with and enhance the word embeddings for improving AEC quality. Results from multiple corpora and several evaluation metrics demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed AEC approach on LROOD data, as well as its generalizability and superiority on large-scale data. Finally, a study on speech emotion recognition confirms that our model produces ASR error-robust transcripts suitable for downstream applications.