VoxEmo: Benchmarking Speech Emotion Recognition with Speech LLMs

Speech Large Language Models (LLMs) show great promise for speech emotion recognition (SER) via generative interfaces. However, shifting from closed-set classification to open text generation introduces zero-shot stochasticity, making evaluation highly sensitive to prompts. Additionally, conventional speech LLMs benchmarks overlook the inherent ambiguity of human emotion. Hence, we present VoxEmo, a comprehensive SER benchmark encompassing 35 emotion corpora across 15 languages for Speech LLMs. VoxEmo provides a standardized toolkit featuring varying prompt complexities, from direct classification to paralinguistic reasoning. To reflect real-world perception/application, we introduce a distribution-aware soft-label protocol and a prompt-ensemble strategy that emulates annotator disagreement. Experiments reveal that while zero-shot speech LLMs trail supervised baselines in hard-label accuracy, they uniquely align with human subjective distributions.

Continued Pretraining for Low-Resource Swahili ASR: Achieving State-of-the-Art Performance with Minimal Labeled Data

We investigate continued pretraining (CPT) for adapting wav2vec2-bert-2.0 to Swahili automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our approach combines unlabeled audio with limited labeled data through pseudo-labeled CPT followed by supervised finetuning. With 20,000 labeled samples, we achieve 3.24% WER on Common Voice Swahili-an 82% relative improvement over the baseline. This result surpasses the best previously reported academic system (8.3% WER from XLS-R) by 61% relative improvement. We provide concrete data requirements and a replicable methodology applicable to other low-resource languages.

Sequence-Level Unsupervised Training in Speech Recognition: A Theoretical Study

Unsupervised speech recognition is a task of training a speech recognition model with unpaired data. To determine when and how unsupervised speech recognition can succeed, and how classification error relates to candidate training objectives, we develop a theoretical framework for unsupervised speech recognition grounded in classification error bounds. We introduce two conditions under which unsupervised speech recognition is possible. The necessity of these conditions are also discussed. Under these conditions, we derive a classification error bound for unsupervised speech recognition and validate this bound in simulations. Motivated by this bound, we propose a single-stage sequence-level cross-entropy loss for unsupervised speech recognition.

Synthetic Data Domain Adaptation for ASR via LLM-based Text and Phonetic Respelling Augmentation

End-to-end automatic speech recognition often degrades on domain-specific data due to scarce in-domain resources. We propose a synthetic-data-based domain adaptation framework with two contributions: (1) a large language model (LLM)-based text augmentation pipeline with a filtering strategy that balances lexical diversity, perplexity, and domain-term coverage, and (2) phonetic respelling augmentation (PRA), a novel method that introduces pronunciation variability through LLM-generated orthographic pseudo-spellings. Unlike conventional acoustic-level methods such as SpecAugment, PRA provides phonetic diversity before speech synthesis, enabling synthetic speech to better approximate real-world variability. Experimental results across four domain-specific datasets demonstrate consistent reductions in word error rate, confirming that combining domain-specific lexical coverage with realistic pronunciation variation significantly improves ASR robustness.

AlphaFlowTSE: One-Step Generative Target Speaker Extraction via Conditional AlphaFlow

In target speaker extraction (TSE), we aim to recover target speech from a multi-talker mixture using a short enrollment utterance as reference. Recent studies on diffusion and flow-matching generators have improved target-speech fidelity. However, multi-step sampling increases latency, and one-step solutions often rely on a mixture-dependent time coordinate that can be unreliable for real-world conversations. We present AlphaFlowTSE, a one-step conditional generative model trained with a Jacobian-vector product (JVP)-free AlphaFlow objective. AlphaFlowTSE learns mean-velocity transport along a mixture-to-target trajectory starting from the observed mixture, eliminating auxiliary mixing-ratio prediction, and stabilizes training by combining flow matching with an interval-consistency teacher-student target. Experiments on Libri2Mix and REAL-T confirm that AlphaFlowTSE improves target-speaker similarity and real-mixture generalization for downstream automatic speech recognition (ASR).

Robust LLM-based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Sparse Modality Alignment and Visual Unit-Guided Refinement

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) integrates acoustic and visual information to enhance robustness in adverse acoustic conditions. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have yielded competitive automatic speech recognition performance and shown effectiveness for AVSR. However, prior approaches project audio and visual features independently or apply shallow fusion, limiting cross-modal alignment and complementary exchange while increasing the LLM's computational load. To address this, we propose AVUR-LLM, an LLM-based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition via Sparse Modality Alignment and Visual Unit-Guided Refinement. Experiments on LRS3 demonstrate state-of-the-art results for AVSR. Under additive-noise conditions at 0 dB SNR, it achieves 37% relative improvement over the baseline system.

Federated Heterogeneous Language Model Optimization for Hybrid Automatic Speech Recognition

Training automatic speech recognition (ASR) models increasingly relies on decentralized federated learning to ensure data privacy and accessibility, producing multiple local models that require effective merging. In hybrid ASR systems, while acoustic models can be merged using established methods, the language model (LM) for rescoring the N-best speech recognition list faces challenges due to the heterogeneity of non-neural n-gram models and neural network models. This paper proposes a heterogeneous LM optimization task and introduces a match-and-merge paradigm with two algorithms: the Genetic Match-and-Merge Algorithm (GMMA), using genetic operations to evolve and pair LMs, and the Reinforced Match-and-Merge Algorithm (RMMA), leveraging reinforcement learning for efficient convergence. Experiments on seven OpenSLR datasets show RMMA achieves the lowest average Character Error Rate and better generalization than baselines, converging up to seven times faster than GMMA, highlighting the paradigm's potential for scalable, privacy-preserving ASR systems.

Duration Aware Scheduling for ASR Serving Under Workload Drift

Scheduling policies in large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) serving pipelines play a key role in determining end-to-end (E2E) latency. Yet, widely used serving engines rely on first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling, which ignores variability in request duration and leads to head-of-line blocking under workload drift. We show that audio duration is an accurate proxy for job processing time in ASR models such as Whisper, and use this insight to enable duration-aware scheduling. We integrate two classical algorithms, Shortest Job First (SJF) and Highest Response Ratio Next (HRRN), into vLLM and evaluate them under realistic and drifted workloads. On LibriSpeech test-clean, compared to baseline, SJF reduces median E2E latency by up to $73\%$ at high load, but increases $90$th-percentile tail latency by up to $97\%$ due to starvation of long requests. HRRN addresses this trade-off: it reduces median E2E latency by up to $28\%$ while bounding tail-latency degradation to at most $24\%$. These gains persist under workload drift, with no throughput penalty and $<0.1$\,ms scheduling overhead per request.

Beyond Word Error Rate: Auditing the Diversity Tax in Speech Recognition through Dataset Cartography

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are predominantly evaluated using the Word Error Rate (WER). However, raw token-level metrics fail to capture semantic fidelity and routinely obscures the `diversity tax', the disproportionate burden on marginalized and atypical speaker due to systematic recognition failures. In this paper, we explore the limitations of relying solely on lexical counts by systematically evaluating a broader class of non-linear and semantic metrics. To enable rigorous model auditing, we introduce the sample difficulty index (SDI), a novel metric that quantifies how intrinsic demographic and acoustic factors drive model failure. By mapping SDI on data cartography, we demonstrate that metrics EmbER and SemDist expose hidden systemic biases and inter-model disagreements that WER ignores. Finally, our findings are the first steps towards a robust audit framework for prospective safety analysis, empowering developers to audit and mitigate ASR disparities prior to deployment.

SCENEBench: An Audio Understanding Benchmark Grounded in Assistive and Industrial Use Cases

Advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled significant capabilities in audio processing, resulting in state-of-the-art models now known as Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). However, minimal work has been done to measure audio understanding beyond automatic speech recognition (ASR). This paper closes that gap by proposing a benchmark suite, SCENEBench (Spatial, Cross-lingual, Environmental, Non-speech Evaluation), that targets a broad form of audio comprehension across four real-world categories: background sound understanding, noise localization, cross-linguistic speech understanding, and vocal characterizer recognition. These four categories are selected based on understudied needs from accessibility technology and industrial noise monitoring. In addition to performance, we also measure model latency. The purpose of this benchmark suite is to assess audio beyond just what words are said - rather, how they are said and the non-speech components of the audio. Because our audio samples are synthetically constructed (e.g., by overlaying two natural audio samples), we further validate our benchmark against 20 natural audio items per task, sub-sampled from existing datasets to match our task criteria, to assess ecological validity. We assess five state-of-the-art LALMs and find critical gaps: performance varies across tasks, with some tasks performing below random chance and others achieving high accuracy. These results provide direction for targeted improvements in model capabilities.