Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) communicate through short click sequences called codas, whose structure includes the rhythmic pattern of inter-click intervals (ICI) and the spectral composition of the clicks. In this paper, we propose the Dual-Channel Contrastive Encoder (DCCE), which explicitly encodes rhythm and spectral information with separate encoders before fusing them. We evaluate DCCE on three coda-understanding tasks: social unit, coda type, and individual identification. We compare DCCE against strong baselines from literature under a common linear-probe protocol and analyze the role of each channel and training objective through ablations. On 1,383 codas, shared partitions and validation-only layer selection support three random splits and three recording-date-disjoint folds. DCCE with unit pairing and type supervision achieves mean random-split macro-F1 of 0.901/0.865/0.597 for unit/type/identity. Raw ICI remains strongest for type (0.987), and ICI plus temporal mel statistics is a strong identity reference (0.724). An auxiliary identity objective improves spectral-branch identity prediction but does not improve the mean fused-identity score in this configuration. Date-grouped evaluation and four year holdouts expose generalization limits. The results support task-dependent combinations of timing and spectral information, without establishing independent biological channels or general architectural superiority. Code, notebooks, and complete results are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29101
We introduce MixAgent, an agentic pipeline for music post-production that follows the workflow of audio engineers to build interpretable and editable mixing plans guided by a reference song. A grouping agent first routes related input tracks, such as drum recordings, into subgroups. A planning agent then uses retrieved examples to choose and order audio effects, such as volume control and reverb, for tracks, subgroups, and the full mix. To refine the mix, a detector identifies what needs correction, and a critic proposes numerical parameter adjustments from tracks to the full mix. In our experiments, prompting recent multimodal models to listen and revise often worsens the mix, making reliable correction a central challenge. We therefore build MixCritic, a dataset of 45,657 repair critiques derived from parameters fitted to professional mixes, and train the critic with supervised fine-tuning followed by preference optimization on rendered audio outcomes. On MedleyDB, learned refinement reduces error by 19% relative to the initial mix, with preference optimization reducing it by 8.4% over supervised training alone. Retrieved examples further improve effects selection, and a human listening test shows that MixAgent gets higher quality ratings than mixes produced by Qwen3-Omni, Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT-4o-audio.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29093
Audio-language models remain unreliable at extracting basic musical properties from audio, motivating pipelines that place a music information retrieval (MIR) tool between the audio and the model. The tool reports measurements such as keys, chords, and structural similarity, and the model is expected to derive the answer. We test whether it can. Holding the musical information fixed, we vary derivation depth: the number of reasoning steps between the tool output and the answer. When the report states the conclusion, all five models score near 100%, and they follow it even when it is wrong. One step away, accuracy drops. On modulation, open models fall to 57-81%, although they answer that single step correctly when asked directly, and reach 0% at greater depths. Frontier models degrade less, but still degrade. Adding the audio does not recover the loss. The bottleneck in tool-augmented music analysis is not access to musical information but reasoning from it, so tool design must account for how much derivation it leaves to the model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29060
Kunqu is one of the oldest extant forms of Chinese opera, yet its digitization remains scarce and difficult to annotate, with two challenges standing out: first, close analysis of Kunqu performance demands syllable-level lyrics alignment; second, analyzing Kunqu pronunciation requires its phonological attributes (e.g., rhyme) to be linked with each syllable. To address these challenges, we present KunSet, the first Kunqu performance corpus comprising 482,164 fine-grained annotations of syllable-level lyrics and phonological attributes in total media duration of 155.2 h with 106.3 h annotated. To ensure annotation quality, KunSet was preannotated by an iterative ML-assisted pipeline and corrected by over 200 trained annotators via a purpose-built online annotation system under a two-round review process. To assess KunSet as a music information retrieval (MIR) benchmark, we evaluate two tasks: lyrics alignment, by finetuning a forced-alignment model with an acoustic anchor decoder; and same-rhyme retrieval, using frozen Chinese HuBERT features. Models built with KunSet outperform their baselines. We release KunSet and model checkpoints to support MIR research on traditional-music corpora.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29031
This research-creation artistic report presents Resonance and Depth, a 9-minute immersive electroacoustic/acousmatic performance that treats timbre and space as primary compositional materials. Built from live electronic percussion and a personal corpus recorded, curated, and composed by the author, the work investigates how timbral identity and musical form can emerge through real-time recombination, spatialisation, and performer-system interaction rather than conventional harmonic development. The performance is realised as an artist-in-the-loop co-creative multi-agent system integrating MACAT, MACataRT, a MIDI-based musical agent, a spatialisation layer, and a conductor agent. These components recombine and transform the performer's material through concatenative synthesis, audio mosaicing, symbolic mediation, physically inspired synthesis, and object-based spatialisation. The work approaches spatialisation as an active compositional process in which position, trajectory, depth, diffusion, width, and apparent size participate in musical phrasing and form. Through this practice-based framework, Resonance and Depth examines how performer identity can be retained, transformed, and redistributed across human, algorithmic, timbral, and spatial processes within an immersive co-creative performance ecology.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29026
Voice style conversion (VSC) aims to transform a source utterance to match the timbre, accent, and emotion of a target voice while preserving linguistic content. StyleStream 1.0 introduced the first streamable zero-shot VSC system with state-of-the-art conversion quality, but remained limited in two ways: approximately 1s end-to-end latency on consumer hardware, and the lack of a text-based interface for designing or editing target voices. We present StyleStream 2.0, a fast and controllable streaming VSC framework that addresses these limitations. To reduce latency, we train a few-step pixel MeanFlow model and further fine-tune it with autoregressive feedback inspired by Self Forcing, improving robustness under streaming inference. This reduces end-to-end latency to 520~ms on a consumer GPU, a 2x speedup over StyleStream 1.0, while maintaining conversion quality. To enable controllable style manipulation, we remove the mel-spectrogram context and instead route target style information through a compact style embedding. In this embedding space, we train a unified text-conditioned flow matching model that supports both text-based voice design, which maps natural language prompts to voice styles, and instruction-based voice editing, which modifies a specific attribute of a source utterance while preserving the rest. Experiments show that StyleStream 2.0 achieves the strongest target style fidelity on VSC, voice design, and voice editing, while remaining competitive on intelligibility and non-edited attribute preservation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28940
Audio autoencoders compress waveforms into compact latent representations that serve as the interface between raw audio and downstream models. Current systems navigate a three-way trade-off between reconstruction quality, semantic structure of the latent space, and inference speed, typically favoring one or two of these at the expense of the others. This paper introduces SAGE, Semantic Audio Generative Encoder: a compact variational autoencoder, trained solely on publicly available music, that shapes its latent by distilling embeddings from a pretrained audio-text model. This 105M-parameter model runs about 3x faster than Stable Audio Open and reaches the listening-test quality of SAME-L, an autoencoder 8x larger and over 2x slower, while surpassing both on objective perceptual and distributional metrics of reconstruction. Furthermore, it sets the state of the art on all nineteen probing tasks of latent semantics, in domain and out of domain. These results establish SAGE as a lightweight audio autoencoder that strikes the best balance of the three-way trade-off among those we evaluate, combining high reconstruction fidelity, state-of-the-art semantic structure, and fast inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32755
Although automatic detection of cognitive impairment from conversational speech is a promising way, it becomes less accurate, as large real-world datasets often contain unreliable diagnostic labels due to self-referral and limited clinical verification, and here we investigated whether neuropsychologically calibrated diagnostic relabeling improves it. We analysed 138 hours of conversational speech from 720 participants, recalibrating unreliable diagnostic labels using attention, executive function, and memory performance via external clinical thresholds, Gaussian, and normative z-score calibration. Transformer-based classifiers were trained using both original and recalibrated labels and evaluated internally on 150 clinically verified participants and externally on Pitt, ADReSS and PROCESS-2 datasets. Memory- and MoCA-based z-score calibration produced the greatest improvements. Using our internal dataset, $F_1$ increased from $0.70$ to $0.83$ ($+13\%$) and from $0.54$ to $0.66$ ($+12\%$) for binary and multiclass classification, respectively. For external validation, the increases are $+4\%$, $+5\%$ and $+9\%$ on Pitt, ADReSS and PROCESS-2 corpus. Neuropsychologically calibrated relabeling substantially improves speech-based cognitive assessment, highlighting label quality, rather than model architecture, as a critical bottleneck in clinical AI for dementia screening.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28288
Reinforcement learning can improve text-to-speech synthesis through feedback on generated speech. However, sentence-level rewards do not identify local errors, while signed regression updates can lead to excessive fitting or repulsion of sampled outputs. We propose LoCA (Local Credit Assignment) for autoregressive flow-matching text-to-speech. LoCA uses ASR-based text alignment to locate content errors in generated speech and redistribute sentence-level advantages across acoustic frames. To improve training stability, we introduce reference-relative positive and negative thresholds that limit continued fitting and repulsion. Experiments on VoxCPM2 show that LoCA reduces sample-weighted content error on a multilingual CV3 evaluation subset by 20.5% and 14.3% relative to the pretrained backbone and GROW, respectively, while improving speaker similarity. LoCA also improves content accuracy on the Seed-TTS-Eval hard subset. Ablation results support the contributions of local credit and threshold-based regression control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28035
Real-world audio typically contains concurrent sound events, yet standard self-supervised methods treat each clip as an isolated training unit without explicitly modeling mixture--constituent relationships. We propose Mixture-to-Constituent Latent Alignment (MiCLA), a two-stage self-supervised pre-training framework that uses synthetic log-mel mixing to align mixture representations with their constituent clips. Stage 1 structures single-clip representations via masked self-distillation and contrastive regularization. Stage 2 introduces bidirectional alignment: for a synthetic mixture, MiCLA suppresses the component aligned with one constituent and aligns the residual with the other, using projective residualization on patch tokens and sample-adaptive soft residualization on the global class token. In downstream evaluations, MiCLA achieves 43.2% mean average precision (mAP) on AS-20K and 50.3% mAP on AS-2M under fine-tuning, and achieves the highest mAP among evaluated models on both AudioSet settings under frozen Convex Gated Probing (CGP). Furthermore, a Joint Semantic Retrieval diagnostic shows that MiCLA improves simultaneous retrieval of both constituent classes over target-averaging baselines. These results indicate that directional mixture-to-constituent alignment provides an effective pre-training signal for polyphonic audio representation learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27491
Speech models are increasingly used as an interface to AI systems, from transcription tools to voice agents. Existing audio backdoors require an attacker to introduce triggers at inference time. We study a different threat model in which the attacker compromises the model during fine-tuning but has no access to the victim's inference-time inputs. We introduce the Speaker-Activated Backdoor (SAB) setting, in which a target speaker's natural voice serves as the trigger. We develop a two-phase fine-tuning method that first makes speaker identity more accessible and then binds the target speaker to an attacker-chosen payload. Compared with a one-phase baseline with the same training budget, the two-phase method substantially improves selectivity and clean performance, and is especially important for content-dependent attacks. SAB achieves 90.2% and 97.0% backdoor success on Whisper-medium and Parakeet, with false-positive rates of 1.7% and 0%, respectively using as little as two minutes of real audio from the target speaker. We further demonstrate content-dependent semantic rewriting and downstream tool-use attacks, where malicious instructions are inserted into 96.9% of target-speaker transcripts. When these transcripts are passed to frontier LLM agents, GPT-4o and Claude (Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku), the injected instruction drives the agent to carry out the harmful action in up to 87.5% of cases. The attack generalizes to held-out recordings, multiple target speakers, and common acoustic degradations. These results establish speaker identity as a practical backdoor trigger that requires no inference-time attacker access and is invisible at the transcript layer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27210
Scene-adaptive immersive audio rendering requires rapid estimation of acoustic parameters that reflect the surrounding environment. For repeated runtime scene updates, performing a detailed geometric-acoustic simulation for every update can be computationally costly. We present Point2Acoustic, a learning-based framework for direct estimation of six-band reverberation time ($RT_{60}$) and reverberant-to-direct ratio (RDR) from 3D scene geometry and acoustic material properties. Each scene is represented by a surface-sampled point cloud with spatial coordinates and frequency-dependent absorption and scattering coefficients, and encoded using PointNet or PointNet++. We train and evaluate the framework on a synthetic furnished-room dataset with varied geometry and acoustic materials, using geometric-acoustic simulation to obtain reference targets. Point2Acoustic achieves accurate multi-band prediction with millisecond-scale inference, and ablation results indicate that explicit global room descriptors and semantic surface labels provide no consistent benefit. The proposed formulation supports efficient scene-adaptive acoustic rendering in extended reality (XR).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27023
Sanskrit verse recitation is governed by $\textit{Chandas}$, a strict prosodic framework defined by rhythmic $\textit{Laghu}$ (light) and $\textit{Guru}$ (heavy) syllables. Because existing Sanskrit speech datasets prioritize ASR or conversational TTS, they lack the metrical fidelity required for authentic verse synthesis. We introduce $\textbf{\textit{ShlokaDhara}}$, a 43-hour, multi-speaker Sanskrit speech corpus capturing diverse meters, recitation styles, and melodic variations. We specifically focus on $\textit{Text-to-Recite}$, a synthesis task explicitly requiring both prosodic accuracy and metrical correctness. Benchmarking state-of-the-art TTS architectures via an automated UTMOS (neural MOS) predictor demonstrates that XTTS-v2 achieves the highest perceptual quality. We further validate the XTTS-v2 generated samples using two paradigms: subjective assessments by 16 Sanskrit experts and novel empirical metrics, specifically, syllable-level $\textit{Laghu-Guru}$ duration analysis to objectively quantify structural metrical awareness. Ultimately, this work establishes a robust dataset and evaluation benchmark for prosody-aware computational Sanskrit recitation. Generated Samples: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26929
Interactive models increasingly hand complex reasoning and tool use to a slow brain in the background, leaving a realtime front model free to sustain full-duplex dialogue. Yet the user may refine, cancel or replace a request while its task runs, so a plan or result that made sense a moment ago goes stale. Each new utterance must therefore be read against the work in flight, but the front model follows only the conversation and the back end sees only its own task. Coordination deserves a brain of its own, one that sees both. We introduce Jarvis, a coordination harness where models judge and code enforces. Its typed decision model, JEV, reads each turn against the live tasks and picks among operations built from a versioned task record. Code checks every choice against the current state before applying it, so no decision can act on a task version the user has replaced. Jarvis also rechecks plans before they execute and results before they are spoken, and counts an answer as delivered only once the user has heard it in full. We build two instances of this design. Jarvis-Audio runs unchanged on three full-duplex speech models. Jarvis-Omni adds vision and rechecks the evidence behind an answer before and during playback, since a scene can change while nobody speaks. With the front model and back end held fixed, replacing Qwen Audio Agent with Jarvis raises tau-Voice task success more than sixfold, from 29 to 192 of 278 tasks, and the gains hold on every benchmark and front model. Against published systems, Jarvis-Audio reaches 69% Pass1 on Full-Duplex-Bench v3 with an open 9B front model, versus 60% for GPT-Realtime. These results suggest that how the two brains are coordinated matters as much as how strong they are.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23804
Self-supervised speech models such as WavLM achieve strong spoofing detection performance, yet which layers encode the most spoof-relevant information and what acoustic properties they capture remain opaque. We present a layer-wise interpretability study of WavLM using the ASVspoof 5 database, combining three complementary analyses: (i) per-layer linear probing with attack-level evaluation across speech synthesis, voice conversion, and adversarial attacks; (ii) a canonical correlation analysis (CCA) linking layer representations to spoofing-relevant acoustic features; (iii) an exhaustive grid search over layer subsets showing that use of five layers outperforms full thirteen-layer pooling. CCA analysis reveals that, while most acoustic features peak in alignment with mid-layers and then decay, voice quality measures jitter, shimmer, and the harmonics-to-noise ratio show the opposite trend, with correlation increasing toward later layers. Embedding visualisations reveal that deeper layers capture a continuous acoustic similarity among attacks rather than discrete categories, suggesting these layers encode fundamental synthesis artifacts rather than attack-specific signatures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23526
The recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) remains a practical choice for streaming speech recognition, but training requires large intermediate tensors. We present Flash RNN-T, a joint and loss implementation combining specialized kernels with optional tiled recomputation over the full alignment space and vocabulary. Tiled and untiled Flash form the entire measured throughput-memory frontier on medium and long workloads. On H100, untiled Flash achieves 24-39% higher throughput with 26-56% less memory than the fastest baseline on these workloads wherever it fits. Tiling reduces memory further through recomputation. On medium, tiled Flash uses ninefold less memory than that baseline at 16% lower throughput when both use one backward call per batch. On long, it fits where all tested alternatives with that backward schedule run out of memory with 80 GB. These comparisons use each implementation's lowest-memory configuration reaching at least 95% of its peak throughput.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23409
Dysarthric audio-visual speech recognition (DAVSR) enhances performance by integrating complementary visual cues. However, existing research is largely confined to word-level tasks with limited vocabularies, which severely restricts real-world communication for dysarthric speakers. Furthermore, performance remains heavily dependent on supervised fine-tuning with speaker-specific data; significant variations in age, etiology, and severity cause traditional methods to struggle with unseen speakers. To address these domain shifts and the scarcity of continuous multimodal resources, we first introduce a "source speech search-segmentation" pipeline to construct a structured sentence-level corpus from raw CDSD videos. We then propose the use of unsupervised Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) for sentence-level DAVSR using Sequential-level Generalized Entropy Minimization (SGEM). Our evaluations across the state-of-the-art AV-SUPERB and ViSpeR frameworks demonstrate that TTA consistently alleviates Character Error Rate (CER) degradation for unseen pathological speakers. Paired t-tests verify that these improvements are statistically significant (p < 0.05), highlighting TTA as a promising paradigm for advancing speaker-adaptive assistive speech interfaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23117
Mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) provides phone-level feedback to language learners, but extending it to new languages typically requires collecting and annotating learner speech for each target language. This repeated annotation effort is costly and limits the language coverage of pronunciation feedback. We study whether MDD capabilities learned from annotated learner speech can be applied to languages unseen during MDD training when canonical pronunciation references are available. Our multilingual LLM-based model, X-MDD, uses canonical speech and phones as references to predict the phone sequence actually produced by a learner. It incorporates in-context demonstrations for inference-time adaptation and is further optimized with group relative policy optimization (GRPO) using detection F1 and phone error rate. We further analyze how canonical inputs affect prediction and find that (1) canonical speech and phones jointly contribute to actual-phone prediction, and (2) conflicting speech evidence reduces the tendency to copy canonical phones. Trained only on Mandarin and English, X-MDD achieves a detection F1 of 38.07 on Arabic Qur'anic recitation, compared with 44.14 for a supervised challenge baseline trained on Arabic. It also achieves F1 scores of 78.68 and 58.78 on Mandarin and English, respectively, demonstrating effective multilingual MDD within a single model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23079
Target speaker extraction (TSE) isolates a desired speaker from a multi-speaker mixture using cues that identify the target. Prior work has explored acoustic and textual cues, such as enrollment audio and different types of speaker descriptors, but typically relies on a single cue family. Yet no single cue is both broadly available and reliably discriminative. Moreover, most TSE systems adopt mask-prediction models, which are prone to audible artifacts and generalize poorly across acoustic conditions. To address these limitations, we propose PromptSep-Speaker, a generative TSE model based on latent diffusion that unifies four interchangeable cues: speaker temporal order, transcript, enrollment audio, and speaker caption. The generative formulation delivers higher separation quality and multi-modal prompting improves applicability across scenarios. To fully exploit each cue, we further introduce a frozen WavLM representation with an auxiliary alignment loss that supervises query-mixture cross-attention without extra labeling. Across four evaluation sets and a listening study, PromptSep-Speaker achieves state-of-the-art performance over TSE and universal source separation baselines, improving separation accuracy and quality across cue modalities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23066
Dynamic music emotion recognition usually estimates concurrent or lag-aligned labels from audio that has already been observed. We instead forecast the change in consensus arousal when the upcoming music is scheduled but all later affect labels remain hidden. Evaluation holds out complete songs, encodes each eligible 4-s chunk independently, predicts arousal innovation, and compares the correct future with displaced segments from the same song. On PMEmo and a 1,494-song DEAM evaluation pool excluded from engineering development, a complete past/future MuQ representation raises concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) by 0.389--0.507 over recent affect and remains 0.268--0.382 above a calibrated nonlinear state model. A future-only trajectory contains no past or current audio and still exceeds that state model by 0.150--0.249. The earliest legal future chunk, which ends 5.5--11 s before the target, also remains informative. Correct placement exceeds an overlapping 5-s shift by 0.100--0.209 and the acoustic-nearest eligible same-song segment by 0.078--0.105, with positive song-cluster lower bounds. These results show that both scheduled content and its within-song position carry forecast information under the stated observation rules. The study provides a leakage-controlled reference for known-future music forecasting without treating predictive substitutions as causal interventions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23063