Robust TTS Training via Self-Purifying Flow Matching for the WildSpoof 2026 TTS Track

This paper presents a lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) system developed for the WildSpoof Challenge TTS Track. Our approach fine-tunes the recently released open-weight TTS model, \textit{Supertonic}\footnote{\url{https://github.com/supertone-inc/supertonic}}, with Self-Purifying Flow Matching (SPFM) to enable robust adaptation to in-the-wild speech. SPFM mitigates label noise by comparing conditional and unconditional flow matching losses on each sample, routing suspicious text--speech pairs to unconditional training while still leveraging their acoustic information. The resulting model achieves the lowest Word Error Rate (WER) among all participating teams, while ranking second in perceptual metrics such as UTMOS and DNSMOS. These findings demonstrate that efficient, open-weight architectures like Supertonic can be effectively adapted to diverse real-world speech conditions when combined with explicit noise-handling mechanisms such as SPFM.

Semantic Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis and Real-Time Control for Humanoid Robots

We present an innovative end-to-end framework for synthesizing semantically meaningful co-speech gestures and deploying them in real-time on a humanoid robot. This system addresses the challenge of creating natural, expressive non-verbal communication for robots by integrating advanced gesture generation techniques with robust physical control. Our core innovation lies in the meticulous integration of a semantics-aware gesture synthesis module, which derives expressive reference motions from speech input by leveraging a generative retrieval mechanism based on large language models (LLMs) and an autoregressive Motion-GPT model. This is coupled with a high-fidelity imitation learning control policy, the MotionTracker, which enables the Unitree G1 humanoid robot to execute these complex motions dynamically and maintain balance. To ensure feasibility, we employ a robust General Motion Retargeting (GMR) method to bridge the embodiment gap between human motion data and the robot platform. Through comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our combined system produces semantically appropriate and rhythmically coherent gestures that are accurately tracked and executed by the physical robot. To our knowledge, this work represents a significant step toward general real-world use by providing a complete pipeline for automatic, semantic-aware, co-speech gesture generation and synchronized real-time physical deployment on a humanoid robot.

Statistical laws and linguistics inform meaning in naturalistic and fictional conversation

Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is through statistical patterns such as Heaps' law, which holds that vocabulary size scales with document length. Little work on Heaps's law has looked at conversation and considered how language features impact scaling. We measure Heaps' law for conversations recorded in two distinct mediums: 1. Strangers brought together on video chat and 2. Fictional characters in movies. We find that scaling of vocabulary size differs by parts of speech. We discuss these findings through behavioral and linguistic frameworks.

Peeking Into The Future For Contextual Biasing

While end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models excel at general transcription, they struggle to recognize rare or unseen named entities (e.g., contact names, locations), which are critical for downstream applications like virtual assistants. In this paper, we propose a contextual biasing method for attention based encoder decoder (AED) models using a list of candidate named entities. Instead of predicting only the next token, we simultaneously predict multiple future tokens, enabling the model to "peek into the future" and score potential candidate entities in the entity list. Moreover, our approach leverages the multi-token prediction logits directly without requiring additional entity encoders or cross-attention layers, significantly reducing architectural complexity. Experiments on Librispeech demonstrate that our approach achieves up to 50.34% relative improvement in named entity word error rate compared to the baseline AED model.

Simulstream: Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluation and Demonstration of Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation Systems

Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation (StreamST) requires producing translations concurrently with incoming speech, imposing strict latency constraints and demanding models that balance partial-information decision-making with high translation quality. Research efforts on the topic have so far relied on the SimulEval repository, which is no longer maintained and does not support systems that revise their outputs. In addition, it has been designed for simulating the processing of short segments, rather than long-form audio streams, and it does not provide an easy method to showcase systems in a demo. As a solution, we introduce simulstream, the first open-source framework dedicated to unified evaluation and demonstration of StreamST systems. Designed for long-form speech processing, it supports not only incremental decoding approaches, but also re-translation methods, enabling for their comparison within the same framework both in terms of quality and latency. In addition, it also offers an interactive web interface to demo any system built within the tool.

MEGState: Phoneme Decoding from Magnetoencephalography Signals

Decoding linguistically meaningful representations from non-invasive neural recordings remains a central challenge in neural speech decoding. Among available neuroimaging modalities, magnetoencephalography (MEG) provides a safe and repeatable means of mapping speech-related cortical dynamics, yet its low signal-to-noise ratio and high temporal dimensionality continue to hinder robust decoding. In this work, we introduce MEGState, a novel architecture for phoneme decoding from MEG signals that captures fine-grained cortical responses evoked by auditory stimuli. Extensive experiments on the LibriBrain dataset demonstrate that MEGState consistently surpasses baseline model across multiple evaluation metrics. These findings highlight the potential of MEG-based phoneme decoding as a scalable pathway toward non-invasive brain-computer interfaces for speech.

Adversarially Robust Detection of Harmful Online Content: A Computational Design Science Approach

Social media platforms are plagued by harmful content such as hate speech, misinformation, and extremist rhetoric. Machine learning (ML) models are widely adopted to detect such content; however, they remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, wherein malicious users subtly modify text to evade detection. Enhancing adversarial robustness is therefore essential, requiring detectors that can defend against diverse attacks (generalizability) while maintaining high overall accuracy. However, simultaneously achieving both optimal generalizability and accuracy is challenging. Following the computational design science paradigm, this study takes a sequential approach that first proposes a novel framework (Large Language Model-based Sample Generation and Aggregation, LLM-SGA) by identifying the key invariances of textual adversarial attacks and leveraging them to ensure that a detector instantiated within the framework has strong generalizability. Second, we instantiate our detector (Adversarially Robust Harmful Online Content Detector, ARHOCD) with three novel design components to improve detection accuracy: (1) an ensemble of multiple base detectors that exploits their complementary strengths; (2) a novel weight assignment method that dynamically adjusts weights based on each sample's predictability and each base detector's capability, with weights initialized using domain knowledge and updated via Bayesian inference; and (3) a novel adversarial training strategy that iteratively optimizes both the base detectors and the weight assignor. We addressed several limitations of existing adversarial robustness enhancement research and empirically evaluated ARHOCD across three datasets spanning hate speech, rumor, and extremist content. Results show that ARHOCD offers strong generalizability and improves detection accuracy under adversarial conditions.

Incorporating Error Level Noise Embedding for Improving LLM-Assisted Robustness in Persian Speech Recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems suffer significant performance degradation in noisy environments, a challenge that is especially severe for low-resource languages such as Persian. Even state-of-the-art models such as Whisper struggle to maintain accuracy under varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). This study presents a robust noise-sensitive ASR error correction framework that combines multiple hypotheses and noise-aware modeling. Using noisy Persian speech, we generate 5-best hypotheses from a modified Whisper-large decoder. Error Level Noise (ELN) is introduced as a representation that captures semantic- and token-level disagreement across hypotheses, quantifying the linguistic distortions caused by noise. ELN thus provides a direct measure of noise-induced uncertainty, enabling the LLM to reason about the reliability of each hypothesis during correction. Three models are evaluated: (1) a base LLaMA-2-7B model without fine-tuning, (2) a fine-tuned variant trained on text-only hypotheses, and (3) a noise-conditioned model integrating ELN embeddings at both sentence and word levels. Experimental results demonstrate that the ELN-conditioned model achieves substantial reductions in Word Error Rate (WER). Specifically, on the challenging Mixed Noise test set, the proposed Fine-tuned + ELN (Ours) model reduces the WER from a baseline of 31.10\% (Raw Whisper) to 24.84\%, significantly surpassing the Fine-tuned (No ELN) text-only baseline of 30.79\%, whereas the original LLaMA-2-7B model increased the WER to 64.58\%, demonstrating that it is unable to correct Persian errors on its own. This confirms the effectiveness of combining multiple hypotheses with noise-aware embeddings for robust Persian ASR in noisy real-world scenarios.

Decoding Fake Narratives in Spreading Hateful Stories: A Dual-Head RoBERTa Model with Multi-Task Learning

Social media platforms, while enabling global connectivity, have become hubs for the rapid spread of harmful content, including hate speech and fake narratives \cite{davidson2017automated, shu2017fake}. The Faux-Hate shared task focuses on detecting a specific phenomenon: the generation of hate speech driven by fake narratives, termed Faux-Hate. Participants are challenged to identify such instances in code-mixed Hindi-English social media text. This paper describes our system developed for the shared task, addressing two primary sub-tasks: (a) Binary Faux-Hate detection, involving fake and hate speech classification, and (b) Target and Severity prediction, categorizing the intended target and severity of hateful content. Our approach combines advanced natural language processing techniques with domain-specific pretraining to enhance performance across both tasks. The system achieved competitive results, demonstrating the efficacy of leveraging multi-task learning for this complex problem.

BEST-STD2.0: Balanced and Efficient Speech Tokenizer for Spoken Term Detection

Fast and accurate spoken content retrieval is vital for applications such as voice search. Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (STD) involves retrieving matching segments from an audio database given a spoken query. Token-based STD systems, which use discrete speech representations, enable efficient search but struggle with robustness to noise and reverberation, and with inefficient token utilization. We address these challenges by proposing a noise and reverberation-augmented training strategy to improve tokenizer robustness. In addition, we introduce optimal transport-based regularization to ensure balanced token usage and enhance token efficiency. To further speed up retrieval, we adopt a TF-IDF-based search mechanism. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms STD baselines across various distortion levels while maintaining high search efficiency.