We introduce Piano2Pop, a music-expansion task that transforms piano MIDI into instrumental pop productions. Enabled by recent advances in music generation and polyphonic music transcription, our pseudo-supervised approach conditions a pretrained flow-matching model on piano rolls without aligned piano-pop supervision. We train on synthetic piano-instrumental pairs derived from pop recordings, comparing pair-free transcription, including function-selective (FST) and register-density (RDA) augmentations, with a pair-supervised piano-cover generator as pseudo-demo sources. On 476 testing real-world piano-cover/pop pairs, the pair-supervised approach achieves the best Frechet Audio Distance, Accompaniment Prompt Adherence, and spectral shape on real-piano inputs, while FST mitigates piano-heavy outputs in pair-free training and remains a promising alternative. All fine-tuned systems significantly outperform the zero-shot baselines, which suggests a role for task-specific modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31510
Underwater acoustic passive detection is essential to maritime surveillance and intelligent ocean sensing. Existing detection systems typically collapse multichannel array observations into a binary decision or a scalar confidence score, offering limited insight into the physical evidence that supports or contradicts a target declaration. This limitation is acute at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), where isolated spectral peaks and transient beamforming responses are inherently ambiguous and physically verifiable targets are characterized by an ensemble of coupled reinforcing cues. Building on the unified from-signals-to-evidence framework introduced in the companion Part I, this paper instantiates the framework for passive target detection. A physics-aware multichannel acoustic encoder encodes the array observations into complementary acoustic evidence tokens through a direction-guided architecture that combines minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) processing with time-frequency and fine-frequency representations. These tokens are combined with environmental priors and fed into a pretrained large language model (LLM) that evaluates target-present and noise-only hypotheses and generates a structured detection report detailing target presence, bearing, spectral-line locations, received SNR, range, and per-field confidence scores. A physics-parameterized data engine extended to realistic oceanic channels provides traceable supervision at both discrete-label and structured-description levels. Experiments under white-noise and mixed ocean-background conditions demonstrate reliable detection, accurate bearing estimation, and physically interpretable structured reports, validating the feasibility of evidence-grounded underwater acoustic detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31346
Long-form temporal audio grounding (TAG) is challenging because target events often occupy only a small portion of a recording, while queries may impose multiple semantic constraints over a large temporal search space. We propose a query-conditioned liquid temporal grounding framework that injects query semantics through FiLM before a closed-form continuous-time (CfC) network models long-range temporal dependencies. Multiple query-relevant candidates are generated, from which a frozen large audio-language model selects the most compatible one for lightweight local boundary refinement. The pretrained backbone remains frozen, with only lightweight grounding modules optimized. Experiments on the English TAG subset of LAT-Bench show consistent improvements across MOSS-Audio and Qwen3-Omni, while ablations confirm the complementary roles of FiLM and CfC.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31252
Transformer-based models have shown strong performance across diverse tasks, but their reliance on self-attention mechanisms often leads to high computational costs. Token sparsification, which reduces the number of tokens processed in transformer layers, offers a promising solution to maintain performance while improving efficiency. However, although widely studied in the vision and language domains, token sparsification remains underexplored in audio, with existing work often limited to a single method, model size, or dataset. This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of token sparsification techniques for audio transformers. We assess a range of token pruning and merging strategies across multiple datasets and model sizes, under both post-training and fine-tuning settings. Furthermore, we introduce a novel sparsification approach that combines attention scores with spectral cues derived from the frequency content of token embeddings. Our experiments show that frequency-aware approaches, particularly those based on spectral flatness and low-frequency energy, consistently outperform attention-only methods. We also find that sparsification based on spectrogram patch intensity is especially effective for longer audio inputs. These results highlight the value of incorporating frequency-domain and input-specific information into sparsification strategies to enhance performance in audio tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31235
In standard acoustic anomaly detection (ASD), models are usually trained separately for each machine or domain using explicit metadata. However, in realistic deployments, machine identifiers are incomplete, unreliable, or simply unavailable. Thus, metadata-free machinery ASD asks a single model to monitor mixed machine populations without machine IDs. In this paper, we argue that the main failure mode is not a weak detector family, but representation entanglement. The heterogeneous normal modes overlap in frozen pre-trained feature spaces, making anomaly scoring and approximate retrieval unreliable. We study this problem directly and propose HARMONY (Hierarchical Anchor Retrieval on Manifold for Oblivious-source acoustic aNomalY detection), an anchor-guided geometric repartitioning framework that reorganizes mixed-source features into compact Voronoi regions and reuses this structure for hierarchical retrieval. On DCASE 2020, HARMONY improves mean AUC from 75.40% to 90.00% (14.60 percentage points) over the strongest unified baseline and from 83.90% to 90.00% over a strong foundation-feature baseline. On a single CPU, its hierarchical retrieval achieves a 7.8x speedup over exhaustive search with only a 0.20 percentage-point AUC drop. These results suggest that incorporating explicit geometric partitioning can improve both detection accuracy and retrieval efficiency for ASD. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31093
Text-to-music alignment is commonly evaluated by the global similarity between text and audio embeddings, which collapses all described attributes into a single score and obscures which ones are missing. We instead introduce MQAScore, which verifies each atomic musical concept along five clip-level dimensions (genre, instrument, mood/theme, vocal, and usage) by the probability that a large audio language model (LALM) answers affirmatively to a binary question. To assess evaluator reliability, we construct verification labels from presence/absence annotations and LLM-guided concept substitutions, and propose the Sensitivity-Invariance Ratio, which measures how selectively an evaluator responds to meaning-changing substitutions. Experiments show that concept-level scoring improves both question-answering and similarity-based evaluators, and MQAScore can be a more reliable and interpretable fine-grained complement to global similarity for evaluating text-to-music alignment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31083
Self-supervised learning (SSL) representations are widely used in speech restoration (SR), and the prevailing trend is SSL feature cleansing: fine-tuning the SSL to recover clean features from degraded speech, then conditioning the restoration model on them. However, the representational capability of SSL when encoding degraded speech has been underexplored, and we ask whether cleansing always benefits SR training. Across SSL encoders and perceptual quality proxies, we discover perceptual correlation collapse---under severe degradation, cleansing degraded SSL features toward clean ones misaligns with the SR objective. We hypothesize the restoration backbone can supply the SSL with clues to resolve this collapse, since its intermediate layers already produce partially restored features. We therefore propose Early Restoration Injection (ERI), which routes intermediate features from the restoration backbone into the SSL through a lightweight conditioning network. ERI excels over the unconditioned baseline and, on the VoiceFixer benchmark, achieves competitive performance among multiple baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30869
This study develops an audio-visual emotion recognition system that integrates automatic utterance segmentation with multimodal fusion. Unlike conventional methods that rely on manually annotated utterance boundaries, the proposed system automatically generates candidate segments from continuous dialogue and extracts the corresponding audio and visual features for emotion classification. To address the challenges introduced by automatic segmentation, the proposed AGF-Net integrates Audio-Guided Fusion (AGF), Multimodal Negative Learning (MNL), and Predictive Dynamic Fusion (PDF) to improve cross-modal fusion, modality balance, and robustness to varying modality quality. Experimental results show that AGF-Net achieves 64.92% Accuracy and 65.47% F1-score under clean conditions, 62.13% Accuracy and 63.08% F1-score under moderate noise, and 58.19% Accuracy and 59.41% F1-score under higher noise. Overall, the proposed framework reduces reliance on manually annotated utterance boundaries and maintains competitive performance under automatically segmented and noisy audio-visual inputs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30651
Controlling emotional intensity remains challenging in expressive text-to-speech synthesis, particularly when emotion must be inferred without explicit labels. We propose EmoFI-TTS, a face-conditioned framework that derives emotion category and intensity from a single facial image while extracting speaker characteristics from reference audio. Modality-specific representations are fused to condition a pretrained speech synthesizer, with cross-speaker training encouraging separation of affect and vocal identity. An intensity-conditioned refinement module enhances the generated mel-spectrogram, while interpolation of learned intensity embeddings enables continuous control without additional training. On speaker-disjoint MEAD evaluation, EmoFI-TTS achieves on average 64.4% and 75.2% objective and subjective emotion intensity accuracies, while retaining low word error rate and high naturalness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30477
Most voice-cloning systems are built for audio alone: they copy the reference recording's delivery and acoustics, so a voice cloned on a phone sounds like a phone recording whether the speaker is pictured in a studio, on a street, or in a cathedral. Speech for a talking video should sound like the pictured person speaking in the pictured place. We present HeyGen Voice, a scene-aware voice-cloning model that separates who is speaking from how and where: it keeps the speaker's voice from an everyday recording while the target image sets the delivery and acoustics. Prior image-conditioned TTS does half of this job: it either adds scene acoustics without keeping a specific speaker or infers a voice from a face. HeyGen Voice is a multimodal autoregressive transformer conditioned on the image, speaker and scene captions, and the voice recording, trained in five stages that move from multilingual TTS pretraining through simulated and real cross-scene adaptation to reinforcement and preference optimization. Two clone policies trade scene adaptation against fidelity to the original recording, and an audio anchor holds long scripts in one voice and one acoustic environment. Listeners prefer HeyGen Voice over leading commercial systems across a third-party arena, production votes, and talking-video studies: it ranks first (Elo 1201) on the public Artificial Analysis controlled-voice TTS leaderboard (October 2026); in a blind test, users cloning their own voice chose it over ElevenLabs v4 and Cartesia Sonic 3.6 in 62% and 54% of votes; and volunteers rated talking videos of their own digital twin about 10 to 30 points higher (out of 100) when voiced by HeyGen Voice than by leading commercial alternatives. Try HeyGen Voice and hear samples at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30470
End-to-end piano audio-to-score (A2S) transcription is the task of reconstructing a notated score from an audio recording in a single system. Existing A2S approaches usually rely on pre-segmented excerpts, and few handle whole pieces without external segmentation. This raises the question of whether a musical-time coordinate can guide score transcription while also helping the system segment whole pieces. Previous work on jazz saxophone A2S uses an external beat tracker to obtain such a coordinate for score prediction. We introduce downbeat phase, a musical-time coordinate learned jointly with score transcription that represents each audio frame's relative position within a notated bar. With this coordinate, our system can not only condition its score decoder on downbeat phase but also self-segment at bar boundaries and stitch the segments into a whole piece. Evaluation suggests that the coordinate improves metrical structure and supports whole-piece transcription with comparable notation quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29928
Evaluating audio-text semantic alignment is important in various audio-language tasks. Existing methods mainly quantify audio-text semantic alignment using a single score and cannot explicitly describe how audio and text differ. In this paper, we propose audio-text difference captioning, a task that generates textual descriptions of differences between audio and text. We also construct a new dataset AT-DIFFER containing audio-text pairs with systematically simulated differences and corresponding difference captions. Using AT-DIFFER, we fine-tune an existing multimodal large language model to describe differences between audio and text. The experimental results show that the original model has limited ability to describe such differences, whereas fine-tuning on AT-DIFFER substantially improves this ability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29836
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient inference through sparse, event-driven computation, yet remain constrained on continuous, context-dependent tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). A key bottleneck is the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron, whose membrane decay erases information across pauses and phonetic boundaries while it must both extract features and retain long-range context. Inspired by cortical separation of nonlinear filtering and somatic integration, we introduce the Spiking Ternary GRU (stGRU): a ternary-weight gated recurrent unit performs temporal filtering, while downstream Resonate-and-Fire (RF) neurons generate the binary spike stream driving the next block's event pathway. This makes binary event transmission a native training constraint rather than a separate deployment-time activation quantization step; together with ternary weights, learned projections avoid dense floating-point matrix MACs. Trained end-to-end on LibriSpeech-960, Small, Medium, and Large stGRUs reach 8.09%, 7.04%, and $6.44 \pm 0.17\%$ WER on test-clean without an external language model. To our knowledge, these are the first matrix-MAC-free spiking networks without a learned ANN sequence decoder to achieve single-digit WER on LibriSpeech. The architecture also achieves 10.88% test CER on Aishell-1 (9.28% on dev) when trained from scratch. Internally, trained networks develop a depth-graded hierarchy: shallow layers act as fast acoustic filters, while deep layers form slower semantic integrators whose latent representations segregate into part-of-speech manifolds and word-level spike events. Deep-layer firing rates follow lognormal distributions with a sparsity gradient, mirroring hierarchical processing observed in human cortex in vivo. Our biologically grounded architecture combines competitive ASR with favorable modeled compute and memory cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29720
Neural speech codecs provide discrete tokens for speech generation. Lower frame rates shorten token sequences, but each token must then carry more linguistic and acoustic information. Variable-frame-rate codecs address this trade-off by adapting token allocation to speech content, but threshold-based allocation lets content determine the token count, so the sequence length a speech generator must produce varies across utterances and datasets at a fixed setting. We present RubatoCodec, a variable-frame-rate speech codec built on X-Codec-2 with an exact utterance-level event budget and streaming decoding. Its Adaptive Firing mechanism uses changes in codec features and waveform spectra to divide speech into variable-duration events without a learned boundary predictor. Discrete codes and an explicit duration represent each event, allowing a speech generator to predict and decode one event at a time. Controlled experiments show that adaptive allocation outperforms fixed-rate coding in reconstruction fidelity and intelligibility at low event rates. A model trained on large-scale multilingual speech achieves competitive reconstruction quality across English, Japanese, and Mandarin, with the best intelligibility preservation among the compared codecs on the evaluated English and Japanese benchmarks at comparable bitrates. In a matched text-to-speech comparison, the adaptive representation yields lower WER and higher UTMOS and UTMOSv2 with comparable speaker similarity. The speech generator also learns the codec's utterance-level event budget without an explicit generation-time rate constraint. These results demonstrate that budgeted adaptive speech representations support both high-quality reconstruction and streaming text-to-speech generation. Code and weights are available at this https URL and this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29434
Multimodal multi-label emotion recognition is important for affect-aware systems, but models trained with complete text, visual, and acoustic streams often degrade sharply when some streams are unavailable at deployment. We address this train-test gap by learning a compact representation that preserves emotion-specific evidence from any available subset of modalities. We propose the Multi-modal Emotion Recognition Perceiver (MERP), which maps the joint sequence into a fixed-size latent bank, thereby keeping repeated reasoning independent of raw input length; it extracts label-specific evidence before and after latent reasoning and aligns the two levels through reconstruction. MERP further uses positive and negative class prototypes, a noise-gated feature enhancer with frequency-shaped perturbations during training, and confidence-aware class-wise fusion to strengthen separability, reduce sensitivity to missing inputs, and combine complementary predictors. Under 20 percent test-time random modality drop, MERP achieves micro-F1 scores of 0.563 on CMU-MOSEI and 0.780 on M3ED, exceeding the strongest evaluated baselines by 0.004 and 0.005, respectively; in the severe CMU-MOSEI audio-only setting, it retains 0.473 micro-F1 versus 0.022 for LDDU. These results show that fixed latent reasoning provides a practical, testable route to robust multimodal emotion recognition without requiring missing-modality examples during training. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29430
Piano transcription models have achieved very high performance in recent state-of-the-art systems, but their performance tends to degrade in ensemble settings where the piano is played alongside other instruments. While some approaches attempt to address this issue by incorporating multi-instrumental datasets, the problem remains challenging. In particular, when other instruments produce high-energy sustained tones while relatively low-energy piano notes occur simultaneously, the magnitude components of their frequency representations overlap, making it difficult to accurately distinguish piano notes. To address this issue, we propose an improved piano transcription model that jointly leverages magnitude and phase information, enabling more robust piano transcription performance in ensemble settings. We evaluate the proposed model on two piano ensemble datasets with precise MIDI note annotations, which we obtained by revisiting and extending existing datasets. Notably, we constructed a new piano concerto dataset, PCD-K, by playing a piano part on a Disklavier and recording the audio and MIDI pairs with pre-recorded orchestral tracks. Experimental results demonstrate that phase information is highly effective in improving performance, outperforming magnitude-based approaches in ensemble settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29222
This paper presents XingChen-UniFE, a unified large audio language model (LALM) for general speech restoration (GSR) and target speaker extraction (TSE). The proposed model employs complementary semantic and acoustic representations through a dual-stream encoder, where a self-supervised learning model provides hierarchical semantic features and a learnable acoustic branch captures fine-grained structures from complex spectra. A bidirectional cross-attention module further facilitates information exchange between the two representations. The fused representation conditions the LALM for discrete speech token generation with task and speaker information. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on both GSR and TSE and robust generalization to unseen degradation conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29164
Timbre similarity is a key evaluation target for generative speech systems, including voice conversion, speaker-cloning text-to-speech, and zero-shot speech models. When the generated voice does not match the target speaker, the problem often reflects imperfect separation of speaker-related timbre from content, making it important to identify where timbre information resides and which representations still carry it. Using speaker identity as a measurable proxy, we probe frequency bands, phase/magnitude structure, WORLD source/filter decomposition, voiced/unvoiced regions, self-supervised learning (SSL) layers, EnCodec/HuBERT tokens, and a 45-listener test across Mandarin, English, and Japanese speech/singing data. Speaker information is distributed: 1--8 kHz magnitude and vocal-tract spectral-envelope structure dominate perception, above-8 kHz bands remain machine-discriminative, shallow SSL layers expose compact speaker information, and token leakage depends on tokenizer/layer choice. These findings indicate where generation systems should condition on or transform speaker information, and where content, codec, and token pipelines should audit residual speaker leakage.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29150
This paper addresses fine-grained prosody control for large-language-model (LLM) based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis of Mandarin Chinese, motivated by multimedia content-creation scenarios---film dubbing, audiobook production, and interactive voice interfaces---in which prosodic adjustments must be placed on specific characters rather than applied uniformly to whole utterances. We present a data-driven framework in which fine-grained prosodic markers (pitch, duration, energy, and pause) are automatically extracted from raw audio at scale and embedded into the text stream as out-of-vocabulary Unicode symbols. The LLM of an existing TTS system is then fine-tuned to interpret these markers while its architecture remains unchanged, yielding character-level temporal control that complements existing utterance-level style control. An optional text-LLM front-end can translate natural-language instructions into marker sequences. Experiments on 2.15M Mandarin utterances (5,858 hours) with CosyVoice2 as the backbone demonstrate reliable control of character duration, pitch, pause duration, and global speaking rate, with perceptual quality essentially preserved. A cross-tokenizer analysis further indicates that the ASR-optimized tokenizer of the backbone attenuates prosodic variation relative to reconstruction-oriented alternatives---an observation we report as hypothesis-generating evidence for prosody-sensitive system design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29123
Target speech extraction (TSE) isolates a speaker's voice given an enrollment utterance, but existing work is validated almost exclusively without music. Discriminative methods are content-faithful yet masking-bounded; generative methods improve naturalness but may hallucinate, drift in identity, and require many steps. We present MuseFlow-TSE, a discriminative deletion, generative insertion framework for music-bearing scenes. Stage-1 is a music-aware cross-source band-split extractor that estimates target, interfering speakers, music, and noise under conservation and music-leakage constraints. Stage-2 is a data-to-data flow refiner initialized by the discriminative estimate, negatively conditioned on interference stems, and run for 1--4 difficulty-adaptive Euler steps with an end-to-end fidelity objective.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29119