Cochlear implants (CI) restore hearing for individuals with severe to profound hearing loss. However, CI users often struggle to understand speech in noisy environments. Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown promise in enhancing speech for CI users, yet their high energy demands make them non-ideal for low-power CI processors. Spiking neural networks (SNN), on the other hand, offer comparable performance with significantly lower energy consumption. Hence, we propose a novel SNN inspired by the Deep ACE architecture that simultaneously performs speech enhancement and CI coding. Our model achieves competitive vocoded short-time objective intelligibility (VSTOI) and signal-to-noise ratio improvement (SNRi) scores compared to Deep ACE, while achieving more than a sixfold reduction in energy consumption.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28493
Deep neural networks (DNNs) based on state-space models (SSMs) are increasingly applied to speech processing, but typically operate on pulse-code-modulated (PCM) audio. This constrains deployment on low-power, always-on edge devices, which commonly use single-bit pulse-density-modulated (PDM) micro-electromechanical (MEMS) microphones for their noise robustness, low cost, and variable sampling rates that enable low-power operation. In fact, converting PDM to PCM requires low-pass filtering and decimation, imposing costly overhead on resource-constrained hardware. While prior works have attempted to process PDM signals directly, they require long training times and generalize poorly across sampling rates. In this paper, we show that the SSM has two key properties that remediate these issues: its continuous-time parametrization allows it to produce a consistent representation of the input audio signal, regardless of the modulation strategy and sampling rate, and its long-term memory enables this representation to be aggressively downsampled without needing any anti-aliasing operations. We then propose a novel end-to-end PDM speech processing architecture that uses an SSM to encode the input audio signal into a modulation- and sampling-rate-invariant latent representation. We show that our proposed architecture achieves robust speech classification and enhancement gains at low-power sampling-rates (512 kHz) and similar performance to state-of-the-art algorithms operating on PCM data when tested on standard PDM sampling-rates of 2 MHz. Moreover, we show that the SSM's output can be downsampled by more than 65,000 times, thus significantly reducing the number of processing timesteps in downstream layers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28472
Musicians commonly communicate music through scores and performances. Scores encode musical intent, while performances realize it in sound. To investigate whether models can meaningfully engage with both modalities, we introduce MuSP-Bench, a human-authored benchmark of 490 questions targeting understanding across Musical Scores and Performances. The benchmark distinguishes itself by spanning score-based, performance-based, interpretive, and long-horizon reasoning across classical piano and orchestral works. We evaluate frontier multimodal large language models under multiple input conditions. Our results show that these models struggle substantially to understand scores, while facing even greater challenges when reasoning about performance audio. The benchmark is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28212
Neural audio representation learning has enabled a range of content-oriented applications, but the resulting features remain limited for tasks involving audio processing. Furthermore, it is not obvious what processing-aware representations should capture: the processing itself, abstracted away from source content, or the processed audio that retains it. Existing approaches implicitly commit to one or the other and also differ in their models, data, and evaluation, obscuring which design choices drive their behavior. We address both questions within a unified framework of three objectives: processing consistency, description alignment, and equivariance via forward prediction. We compare all combinations of the objectives under a controlled setup and reveal their relative strengths and interactions. Our framework produces both a transformation embedding and a processed-audio embedding, and we find that the two play complementary roles: distance-based tasks favor the former, while probe-based tasks favor the latter. Combined with improvements in network architecture and training pipeline, our representations outperform prior baselines across retrieval, probe-based evaluation, and style transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28127
This paper deals with the introduction of "geometric harmony", a discipline that explicitly addresses the spectral characteristics of musical gamut. The framework of Western music, from Renaissance to the present, represents sound in terms of "pitch"-as is evident from its five-line staff notation system-and employs the fundamental frequency as its representative value, 440 Hz, etc. In this paper, by taking the timbres of specific individual instruments as elements and examining the Wasserstein distance between two voices, and Wasserstein deviations between three or more voices, we demonstrate that it is possible to expand the system whilst retaining the entire framework of conventional music theory. At the same time, as an example of practical utility in ensemble playing, we provide a detailed account of the two-voices affinity of the "Throat G" on clarinet, a note known for its fragility in ensemble contexts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28026
The relationship between subjective test vote variance and vote mean (or MOS) is well-studied, and the mathematically admissible vote variance region has been previously defined. We propose a reduced admissible variance region called the Unimodal Variance Region (UVR) that better describes real subjective rating behavior of multimedia. Further, subjective vote variance is often modeled as parabolic. We explain that, in practice, the parabolic model often violates the admissible region in the variance vs. MOS plane and we propose alternatives that respect the admissible region. We also present a parametrized random process to model votes that mixes voting processes and produces a realistic range of vote variances within the UVR at any desired MOS. This process was inspired by and comports with voting behavior that is observed in many subjective tests. By modeling vote variance from a subjective experiment, this vote model offers additional interpretable insights into voting behavior observed in a given experiment. We present example results from 16 datasets spanning speech, image, and video subjective quality experiments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27724
In out-of-domain (OOD) sound-matching, a synthesizer is optimized to mimic a sound it did not generate. OOD evaluation of loss functions is underexplored in part because the standard "parameter loss" metric requires a shared parameter space between target and imitator, which OOD settings lack. We introduce Partial Parameter Distance (PPD), which applies parameter loss only to the critical parameters that mismatched synthesizers share (e.g., filter cutoffs), enabling automatically evaluated OOD experiments; we verify its results with blinded listening tests. Across seven scenarios involving band-pass filtering, amplitude modulation, and pitch-bending, we evaluate four differentiable loss functions (SIMSE_Spec, L1_Spec, JTFS, DTW_Envelope). Loss-function effectiveness remains tightly coupled to the method of synthesis: SIMSE_Spec excels at filter-cutoff recovery, DTW_Envelope at amplitude-modulation recovery, and JTFS at smooth pitch trajectories. Parameter-based evaluation agrees with listening tests on the top-ranked loss function in five of seven scenarios, demonstrating its utility as a diagnostic tool.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27698
Silent speech recognition (SSR) provides an alternative communication pathway in the absence of audible speech. However, conventional approaches are limited by the need for constant facial attachment, privacy concerns, and unstable signal acquisition. Here, we propose a soft, active electromyography (EMG) interface that enables word-level SSR using machine learning. Worn on the hand, the device uses a fingertip electrode that can be positioned near the lips to acquire EMG signals only when needed. The interface integrates liquid metal (LM) interconnects, transparent flexible printed circuit (FPC) electrodes, and elastomer encapsulation to ensure high mechanical stability during finger motion. A deep neural network trained on these stable signals achieved a mean accuracy of 97.2 $\pm$ 1.3% across three subjects in classifying a 30-word vocabulary, demonstrating robust linguistic discrimination. Furthermore, real-time drone control validates the practicality of this approach in noisy and privacy-sensitive environments where conventional voice recognition fails. This study highlights the potential of soft, wearable EMG systems as secure and intuitive human-machine interfaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27048
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of audio understanding tasks. However, they are typically evaluated on single, coherent audio segments, leaving their behavior under less familiar input configurations underexplored. We study this issue through a controlled setting in which two audio segments are concatenated into a single input. Across multiple LALMs, we observe a striking task-dependent robustness gap: automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains comparatively stable, whereas audio question answering (AQA) degrades substantially. To investigate the mechanisms underlying this disparity, we analyze how audio information is routed through LALM decoders using layer-wise attention knockout. The results reveal distinct task-dependent pathways. ASR relies primarily on direct retrieval from audio tokens by answer tokens, whereas AQA depends more strongly on a mediated route in which audio information is first integrated into prompt tokens and subsequently accessed during generation. We further probe prompt-token representations under audio concatenation and find that task-relevant audio attributes remain readily decodable, particularly in middle and later decoder layers, even when AQA performance deteriorates sharply. This dissociation indicates that the failure cannot be explained by complete loss of audio information from the decoder states and is instead consistent with a downstream bottleneck in retrieving or utilizing prompt-mediated information during answer generation. Together, our findings reveal task-dependent audio information routing in LALMs and highlight information utilization as a potential limitation on their generalization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27026
General audio comprehension now covers speech, sound, and music over durations from seconds to hours, driven by large audio-language models (LALMs) that are increasingly omni-modal. Yet the benchmarks that test them still rely on clips of seconds, where scores saturate and models converge; recent long-form efforts extend duration but evaluate long audio much as short clips are. We introduce AudioSpan, a benchmark that spans both duration and depth: it pairs audio from 10 minutes to over 2 hours with 3,240 questions across three cognitive levels, namely perception, understanding, and reasoning. Two paths supply the questions, differing in how question content is sourced and how ground truth is obtained. Native QA extracts questions from the audio's content, posing each as a multiple-choice item and an open-ended one graded by detailed rubrics. Anchor QA instead injects ground truth, planting acoustic anchors into the audio and building a perception-to-reasoning chain scored only to the first error. A fully automated pipeline constructs every item through structured captioning, QA generation, and adversarial critic feedback. Evaluating 12 LALMs on AudioSpan, we find the hard part comes before reasoning: distilling a few relevant facts from a long, redundant signal. This difficulty grows with audio length and falls hardest on perception, especially temporal grounding. AudioSpan is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26431
Conversational systems, such as duplex speech language models (SLMs), still lack a streaming, accurate, and empathetic memory system as their soul. We introduce VoiceMem, a simple memory architecture with a parallel informational left brain, an emotional right brain, and streaming memory I/O mechanisms. We further build a complete pipeline for memory-aware SLM training, long-horizon evaluation, and decoupled deployment with interchangeable memory backends. Experiments and real-world deployment show three advantages: i) Accuracy: under top-5 retrieval, the left brain outperforms classical systems such as Mem0 at top-200 by nearly 30 points; ii) Emotional & Personal: the right brain, with short- and long-horizon affective attribution and dual-node persona modeling, achieves state-of-the-art performance across three persona benchmarks and improves the aggregate score by 4.29 points over the previous best system; and iii) Real-Time & Cheap: VoiceMem completes retrieval in 134 ms, well within standard VAD latency, adding no extra conversational delay while maintaining high accuracy and low cost. These results show that VoiceMem provides a practical memory foundation for real-time, personalized, and emotionally aware speech interaction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26005
Cough acoustics are promising for non-invasive tuberculosis (TB) screening, yet whether machine learning (ML) models capture disease-related acoustics or artifacts of data collection remains unresolved. We evaluated the cross-dataset generalizability of classical ML and deep learning (DL) cough-based TB classifiers across three independent datasets. Despite moderate within-dataset performance (ROC-AUC up to $0.755 \pm 0.056$), both pipelines fail to generalize, with external performance frequently below 0.6, indicating a possible limitation of the data. We further observed audio representations are organized by recording device and dataset rather than TB status, predicted TB probability tracks country-level prevalence in CODA, and device mismatch degrades transfer while device-diverse training improves it. Additionally, a clinical-variable baseline generalizes more consistently (ROC-AUC $0.655 - 0.711$), indicating acquisition-specific variability is a stronger driver of poor generalizability than population shift. High within-dataset performance is not enough. External validation is essential before cough-based TB models are clinically ready.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25846
Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed training of machine learning models while preserving data privacy. However, FL struggles with heterogeneous, non-IID client data distributions, resulting in sub-optimal and biased global models. In this paper, we propose pFedMARL, a novel approach leveraging Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) with Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) to dynamically adapt aggregation strategies in FL settings. Our method employs a server-side agent adjusting client contributions to optimize global model robustness and client-side agents balancing global and local updates to personalize models effectively without pre-training. We demonstrate superior performance of pFedMARL for training a semi-supervised audio spectrogram transformer, matching or outperforming FedAvg, Ditto, and local training approaches across multiple non-IID scenarios and in the presence of adversarial clients. Our results indicate that pFedMARL actively improves accuracy, robustness, and fairness, making it suitable for real-world deployments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25794
Conventional music representations describe acoustic energy over time and frequency but do not explicitly expose relations among simultaneous frequency components. We introduce the \emph{Dissonance Spectrum} (DS), a nonnegative time--frequency representation that applies a tolerance-based rational pitch-relation kernel with logarithmic harmonic distance to a constant-Q spectrum and attributes aggregate pairwise interactions back to individual frequency bins. Controlled music-theory tests show strong ordinal agreement for intervals, harmonic-function connections, and church modes, and weaker but significant agreement across diverse chord voicings. DS is then encoded by a lightweight parallel branch whose zero-initialized residual projection preserves the baseline function at initialization. Across six paired training seeds in open-ended music question answering and categorical and dimensional music emotion recognition, DS obtains the highest mean on every reported endpoint relative to the unchanged baseline, a parameter-matched Gaussian-input branch, and an architecture-matched magnitude-CQT branch. These results support DS as an interpretable, complementary representation, while listener-specific perception and broader task coverage remain open problems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25621
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of audio tasks. As they are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their safety alignment has become more important. Although refusal mechanisms serve as a key safeguard by preventing LALMs from responding to harmful requests, they can also lead to over-refusal, where models incorrectly reject benign queries. This issue is especially challenging in the audio domain because speech that appears harmful in isolation may become benign when interpreted together with the surrounding acoustic context, such as background sounds. To study this problem, we introduce AOR-Bench (Audio Over-Refusal Benchmark), the first benchmark for over-refusal specifically designed for LALMs. AOR-Bench contains 3,000 pseudo-harmful audio samples across six scenario categories. Evaluating 12 representative LALMs from six major model families, we find that over-refusal is widespread (Figure 1) and uncover several important patterns in their safety judgments. As a preliminary effort to mitigate this issue, we further explore two lightweight strategies (e.g., Chain-of-Thought and activation steering) to reduce over-refusal.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21147
Omnimodal large language models (Omni-LLMs) integrate audio, video, and text, yet remain vulnerable to cross-modal hallucinations, where one modality improperly influences predictions about another. Existing training-free decoders modulate modality influence through perturbation or relevance weighting, but do not assess predictive compatibility within the joint audio-visual branch. Because joint-branch discrepancies may indicate either harmful interference or useful complementarity, reliable intervention requires assessing both discrepancy magnitude and actionability. To this end, we propose Conflict-Aware Decoding (CAD), a training-free framework comprising Potential Conflict Magnitude Estimation (PCME) and Conflict Actionability Assessment (CAA). PCME quantifies potential conflict using audio-video disagreement and the deviation of the joint prediction from a relevance-weighted unimodal reference. CAA then applies Dempster-Shafer reliability discounting to task-space answer relations, using query relevance and answer decisiveness to determine whether intervention is warranted. When an actionable conflict is identified, CAD selectively reallocates decoding weight from the joint branch to the unimodal branches. Experiments on CMM, AVHBench, WorldSense, and VideoMME show that CAD consistently outperforms the base decoder and competitive training-free methods across multiple audio-visual backbones. On Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, CAD improves overall accuracy by 14.1 and 8.0 percentage points on CMM and AVHBench, respectively, without model retraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04247
This paper proposes acoustic echo control based on sound object identification for suppressing acoustic echo and howling in conferencing environments with complicated acoustic paths, where multiple hands-free terminals coexist in the same room. Conventional acoustic echo cancellers target fixed intra-device echo paths; however, unintended paths, for example, those formed via inter-terminal communication, are difficult to control and can lead to howling. Instead of estimating echo paths, the proposed approach identifies sound objects and keeps channels muted by default, allowing pass/playback only when the signal is judged not dentical to recently observed objects. This breaks echo loops caused by repeated reproduction of the same sound object and can be viewed as an extension of classical voice switching toward conditional half-duplex operation. Technical challenges and connections to related techniques are discussed, and a simulation shows howling suppression together with a trade-off against speech quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25413
Partial manipulation of speech recordings, where only localized segments of an utterance are altered, poses a significant challenge for content integrity verification, as reliable detection and localization of such edits becomes harder as the manipulated proportion decreases. Watermarking offers a proactive defense alternative by embedding auxiliary information prior to distribution; classical hash-based schemes achieve near-perfect detection and localization under ideal conditions, but the original content cannot be recovered once a segment is manipulated. Building on a prior self-embedding audio steganography framework, this work presents an initial exploration of proactive defense performance under ideal conditions, extending the investigation along three axes: frame-level localization, multi-bit least significant bit variants, and evaluation across multiple ultra-low-bitrate neural codec representations. By embedding a compact neural codec representation rather than a cryptographic hash, the framework additionally enables recovery of the manipulated regions, while supporting training-free detection and localization without spoofed examples. Experiments across four controlled manipulation types under ideal channel conditions show that the embedded payload, and hence an approximate reconstruction of the authentic content, is always fully recovered without bit errors. The results also indicate that the choice of neural codec is the dominant factor for detection and localization performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25289
Partial deepfake speech, where only limited segments of an utterance are synthesized or manipulated, poses a significant challenge to existing deepfake detection systems. As the proportion of spoofed regions decreases, passive detectors become increasingly unreliable, and accurate detection and restoration remain challenging. In this paper, we revisit audio steganography from a new perspective and propose its use as a proactive defense against partially deepfaked audio. In particular, we consider a self-embedding strategy in which a clean speech signal embeds a compressed representation of itself, enabling post-hoc extraction of reference content. We demonstrate how existing audio steganography methods can be repurposed to support detection of partial deepfakes through codec-based restoration. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that the proposed approach complements passive defenses. Remarkably, the proposed method operates without any training, providing a robust and data-efficient alternative for partial deepfake detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25285
Recent open text-audio contrastive models (CLAPs) are typically trained with LLM-generated captions derived from tag datasets or web search results, which tend to be accurate but expressively narrow. As a complementary source, we explore human-written album reviews, specifically expert reviews from AllMusic: they exist at scale and carry narrative cues, evaluative adjectives, and scene framing that other sources lack. Since raw reviews are too noisy for direct use as captions, we first build a caption corpus with 24,5346 samples via an LLM preprocessing pipeline that identifies descriptive musical quotes and rewrites them into training-ready captions. We find that album review supervision yields the largest retrieval gains on a human-written caption benchmark (Song Describer), particularly for complex queries that other existing caption datasets leave uncovered. In addition, we revisit the training recipe and show that SigReg regularization, which encourages an isotropic Gaussian distribution in the embedding space, improves MLP probing across classification tasks, as well as text-to-music retrieval. The resulting model outperforms open CLAP-style baselines on text-to-music retrieval, zero-shot classification, and most MLP probing tasks. We release the review-derived caption dataset and model weights to support future research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25244