Audio clustering is a fundamental task for organizing rapidly growing speech collections, supporting applications such as conversational analysis and speech-driven discovery. However, existing methods rely on fixed acoustic similarity metrics or ASR-based text pipelines, limiting their ability to reorganize the same audio collection under different user-specified perspectives, especially when clustering depends on both linguistic and paralinguistic cues. We introduce audio multi-perspective clustering, where a model directly partitions speech recordings according to a natural-language perspective while inferring both the number of clusters and their assignments. To study this setting, we construct AudioLens-Bench, a benchmark spanning multiple application domains and evaluating both in-perspective and cross-perspective generalization. We further propose AudioLens-R1, an end-to-end large audio-language model trained with reasoning distillation and preference optimization. Experiments show that AudioLens-R1 consistently outperforms all baselines, improving overall ARI by 12.99 points and V-measure by 11.62 points. These results demonstrate the promise of native audio-language models for flexible, perspective-conditioned structure discovery over speech collections.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25177
Fully few-shot class-incremental audio classification (FFCAC) requires recognizing new sound classes from only a handful of labeled examples per session, without forgetting previously learned classes and without any large base dataset. Existing methods typically freeze a pre-trained audio--language encoder and classify with point prototypes, but they suffer from significant performance degradation throughout the sessions due to generic feature representations. We propose SPECTRA, a framework built on a frozen encoder which adds three components. (i) a lightweight trainable adapter that calibrates the generic embeddings to the task; (ii) subspace feature replay, an exemplar-free anti-forgetting scheme that replays old classes by sampling from the low-rank subspace of their stored features; and (iii) a transductive optimal-transport refinement of prototypes at test time. Our central finding is that the subspace structure of the replay diminishes forgetting and outperforms naive Gaussian replay of equal variance. On three FFCAC benchmarks (NSynth-100, FSC-89, LS-100), SPECTRA improves average accuracy and reduces forgetting over current state-of-the-art methods, and our ablations statistically validate each component.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25054
Polygonal synthesis generates audio by traversing the perimeter of a polygon with a phasor; prior work uses a constant angular velocity, whereas the proposed system adopts constant arc-length (perimeter) velocity. Existing formulations operate on regular, parametrically defined polygons, producing smooth timbral transitions within a single family of shapes. This paper generalizes polygonal synthesis around a unified arc-length engine: vertex data of any origin feed the same DSP pipeline. First, we adapt the oscillator to accept arbitrary vertex configurations from an external buffer, opening the possibility for a broad class of closed polygons -- regular, irregular, or star-shaped -- to function as a waveform generator. Second, a hybrid interpolation algorithm enables smooth morphing between polygons with unequal vertex counts, passing through intermediate shapes that have no parametric description. Third, we extend the paradigm to three dimensions: a convex polyhedron rotated about three axes is sliced by a fixed horizontal plane, and the resulting cross-section yields a continuously variable polygon controlled by the solid's orientation. The system runs in RNBO (Cycling~'74) with a geometry caching strategy that avoids per-sample recomputation. Antialiasing combines a four-point polyBLAMP correction derived from runtime Bézier tangents with adaptive oversampling, adapting the correction geometrically to general vertex configurations without per-shape analytical derivation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24726
One algorithmic composition may require a Csound score, engraved notation, real-time control, and a rehearsal click. Authored separately, their timelines drift. Temporal System is a Wolfram Language paclet that instead compiles one immutable store of typed entities on a rational beat timeline through backend-specific contracts. It emits Csound synthesis, beta MusicXML 4.0, OSC control, and click artifacts that remain synchronized because they share that store. Conversion to seconds, samples, or hertz occurs only at render time. Csound notes use stable named instruments in external .orc files; curves become k-rate signals declared against score p-fields. The click backend derives rehearsal audio from the same meter and tempo and reuses the Csound serializer. We describe the temporal, semantic, and rendering-contract layers, their practical trade-offs, and the limits of this proprietary authoring environment within an otherwise open-source ecosystem. The archived supplement exposes the reported outputs pending paclet release.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24683
Markov models are established tools for symbolic music, including non-homogeneous formulations. The narrower contribution examined here is an observation-driven estimation mechanism: overlapping sliding windows derive a trajectory of local transition kernels from one symbolic sequence rather than from an exogenous formal partition. We test this mechanism on 273 logical note events from Debussy's Syrinx (1913), using the often-proposed A-B-A' reading as a reference rather than ground truth. We apply the same validation to absolute-pitch and notated-duration kernels. At $L=6$, both reference boundaries attain the Jensen--Shannon maximum in both dimensions; the duration plateau is substantially narrower (64 of 267 comparisons) than the pitch plateau (210 of 267). Because the theoretical maximum for consecutive sliding-window comparisons is set by window geometry and equals $1/\sqrt{L-1}$ for maximal turnover of the entering/leaving transition, the pitch value at $L=6$ and its broad plateau are not, by themselves, strong evidence. Their cross-dimensional alignment is consistent with boundary sensitivity, while the broad plateaus preclude treating either curve alone as a unique automatic segmenter. Five-hundred-draw re-synthesis experiments quantify departure from the source in both dimensions and expose an exact-copy degeneracy at $L=2$.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24660
Conventional audio language models (ALMs) have made significant progress in achieving alignment between auditory and textual representations, including recent explorations in spatial audio. However, in daily spatial scenarios, they still cannot effectively process multi-event audio sequences. Current approaches primarily rely on coarse-grained contrastive learning with global auditory and textual features, lacking the resolution to distinguish multiple sequential events. To overcome these limitations, we propose CoSTALA-a novel training paradigm that transitions from purely global alignment to fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning. By constructing a multi-granularity hierarchical loss function system, we achieve explicit modeling of temporal dependencies, and successfully anchors individual acoustic events to preserve their semantic purity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoSTALA significantly establish a powerful new framework for spatio-temporal audio understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24374
A unified audio model must recognize and understand linguistic, paralinguistic, and environmental information while supporting speech synthesis and editing. A key challenge is representation: understanding favors compact features suited to long-context modeling, whereas speech generation requires reconstructible features that preserve fine-grained acoustic detail. We introduce FireRedAudio, a general-purpose audio language model with a shared 9B-parameter LLM. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first publicly disclosed unified audio-language model to provide separate continuous input representations for understanding and generation within a single trainable autoregressive LLM. Audio to be recognized or analyzed is processed by a dedicated Audio Encoder, while speech inputs for generation use a RedAE-based pathway. The LLM directly generates text or conditions a flow-matching DiT to produce continuous acoustic latents. Through progressive multitask training, FireRedAudio supports ASR and audio understanding, with the latter extending to recordings of up to one hour, as well as zero-shot TTS, Instruct TTS, and semantic and acoustic speech editing. Its structured organization of long-form audio achieves second-level timestamp accuracy. Across comprehensive evaluations, FireRedAudio achieves competitive or leading performance in audio understanding and multilingual ASR, strong content accuracy and speaker preservation in zero-shot TTS, leading instruction following in Instruct TTS, and substantial improvements over Ming-UniAudio-Edit in both semantic and acoustic speech editing. These results demonstrate the viability of decoupled continuous input representations for unifying audio understanding and continuous-latent speech generation in a model of moderate scale. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24168
Recent advances in generative audio models have enabled highly realistic synthetic speech, increasing the importance of reliable audio deepfake detection (ADD) systems. While prior studies have primarily focused on adversarially optimized perturbations, the robustness of ADD systems under realistic signal transformations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the impact of audio watermarking on ADD systems by treating watermarking as a structured, non-adversarial perturbation rather than a conventional attack mechanism. Using a watermark-based evaluation framework built upon WavMark, we evaluate multiple self-supervised learning (SSL), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Graph Neural Netrowk (GNN)-based ADD models across several benchmark datasets. Beyond conventional detection metrics, we further analyze watermark-induced representation shifts using Fréchet Distance, cosine similarity, and L2 distance in the embedding space. Experimental results reveal a strong dataset-dependent behavior: watermarking causes substantial performance degradation on ASVspoof 2021 LA and DF, while exhibiting limited impact on ASVspoof 2024, FoR, and ITW. Moreover, large embedding-space shifts are strongly associated with severe detection degradation, suggesting that watermark-induced perturbations can substantially alter the feature representations relied upon by current ADD systems. These findings demonstrate that benign signal transformations designed for content protection can expose previously overlooked robustness vulnerabilities in audio deepfake detection systems. Our code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24159
Audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE) uses visual-speech cues from a target speaker to recover that speaker's speech from noisy or overlapping speech. Many widely used protocols construct mixed signals from separately recorded audio sources and assume reliable video, leaving their performance under natural overlap and visual failure insufficiently characterized. The Real-World AVSE Challenge evaluates two related settings. Track~1 comprises two scenarios: real-world mixtures recorded with two speakers speaking simultaneously, without a corresponding clean reference signal, and synthetic remixes obtained by manually mixing the separately recorded speech of two speakers, with a clean reference signal available; Track~2 reuses audio but pairs it with a degraded target video and contains additional 3-m far-field recordings. The speakers in the development and test sets are disjoint. Evaluation metrics include clean-waveform fidelity, learned quality estimates, transcription accuracy, and speaker identification. In the remix task on the development set, the baseline model achieved an SI-SDR of $-4.069$~dB and an STOI of $0.388$ on Track~1, and an SI-SDR of $-2.851$~dB and an STOI of $0.470$ on Track~2. We release the AV-ConvTasNet checkpoints, the offline evaluator, and the official baseline results on the development and test sets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23759
Recent audio generation models can synthesize high-fidelity speech, environmental sound, singing voice, and music, creating new risks for multimedia trust. Existing audio deepfake detection (ADD) benchmarks remain predominantly speech-centric and often underrepresent realistic channel variation and diverse audio types. This paper presents AT-ADD, a large-scale benchmark and challenge designed to evaluate both robust speech deepfake detection and all-type audio deepfake detection. Track 1 evaluates binary speech detection under unseen generators, diverse recording conditions, signal perturbations, and replay effects. Track 2 evaluates type-agnostic real/fake detection over speech, sound, singing, and music when the audio type is unknown at test time. We detail the dataset construction, evaluation protocol, and reproducible baselines, and analyze the final systems submitted to the ACM Multimedia 2026 Grand Challenge. The strongest official baseline obtains 76.73% and 79.47% Macro-F1 on the Track 1 and Track 2 evaluation sets, respectively, whereas the winning challenge systems reach 90.71% and 96.10%. Beyond aggregate rankings, sample-level analysis of the top five submissions examines generator- and type-level difficulty, cross-system error complementarity, and ranking stability. The results show that large-scale self-supervised representations, condition-aware augmentation, multi-crop inference, and structured fusion or routing are central to generalization, while generator-specific robustness and consistent performance across diverse audio types remain unresolved.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23437
Speech emotion recognition (SER) may enable passive affect monitoring in clinical encounters, but most systems are validated on acted laboratory speech rather than naturalistic Mandarin outpatient consultations. We benchmarked three open-source SER models (emotion2vec+, SenseVoice, FunASR) against a researcher-consensus reference in naturalistic spine-clinic speech, assessing minority-state detection under class imbalance. In a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected single-center recordings, audio was loudness-normalized and only conversations among patients, family members, and clinicians were retained. Sixty-five utterances (5-50 s; one per participant; 31 patients, 34 family members) were labeled by six calibrated annotators into six categories (Happy, Sad, Fear, Anger, Neutral, Surprised). Consensus used majority vote with Fleiss kappa filtering and clinician adjudication for low-agreement segments. Metrics included unweighted accuracy (UA), macro-average per-class accuracy, class- and sample-level weighted accuracy (WA), and F1 with bootstrap 95% CIs. Labels were imbalanced (Neutral 58.5%); median Fleiss kappa was 0.230 (IQR 0.134-0.519). SenseVoice and FunASR achieved UA 61.5% (95% CI 49.2-73.8%), macro-average per-class accuracy 87.2%, class-level WA 92.5%, and sample-level WA 24.6%. emotion2vec+ yielded UA 55.4% (95% CI 42.5-67.7%) and macro-average per-class accuracy 85.1%, with class-level WA 90.6% and sample-level WA 24.2%. Despite high inter-model agreement (90.8%), all models had near-zero recall for Sad, Fear, Anger, and Surprised. In this pilot, majority-class accuracy was misleading: SER poorly detected minority emotions against a noisy naturalistic reference. Clinical deployment readiness cannot be inferred from acted-corpus benchmarks without domain adaptation, multimodal modeling, stronger reference standards, and outcome validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26054
Audio-Dependent Question Answering (ADQA) requires Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) to answer questions whose correct answers depend on the given audio content. Successful ADQA requires accurate audio perception, identification of question-relevant evidence, and cross-modal reasoning. Using the official ADQA dataset of DCASE 2026 Task 5, we investigate reasoning-oriented post-training with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and inference-time LoRA rescaling for both Qwen2.5-Omni and MOSS-Audio-8B-Thinking. We introduce a structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework that decomposes the reasoning process into question analysis, question type, audio evidence, and reasoning. We then analyze how task-specific LoRA adaptation affects the two backbones and further explore inference-time rescaling of trained LoRA adapters. Experiments on the development set reveal markedly backbone-dependent behavior: post-training improves the Qwen-based systems but substantially degrades MOSS-Audio under our supervised fine-tuning configuration. Moderate LoRA rescaling further improves the best Qwen system's top-1 accuracy from 58.93% to 61.05% and partially restores the performance of the fine-tuned MOSS-Audio models, while the best MOSS-Audio system achieves 67.70% top-1 accuracy. Our submitted systems ranked third overall and second among lightweight systems under 10B parameters in the challenge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23092
The Lipschitz continuity of deep neural networks (DNNs) is essential for establishing theoretical guarantees regarding their behavior. From both theoretical and practical perspectives, various methods have been proposed to construct Lipschitz-continuous architectures and control their Lipschitz constants. However, several DNN architectures common in audio signal processing fall outside the scope of existing theoretical frameworks, hindering the development of Lipschitz-continuous models in acoustic applications. In particular, despite their widespread adoption, DNNs that separately process the magnitude and phase of complex-valued signals cannot be Lipschitz continuous under existing frameworks. In this paper, to address this limitation, we establish a theoretical foundation for constructing amplitude modifiers (AMs), a class of DNN architectures that operate solely on the magnitude of a complex-valued input, with provable Lipschitz continuity. Specifically, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for an AM to be Lipschitz continuous and propose LipsAMs (Lipschitz-continuous AMs) corresponding to common architectures for audio signals, including time-frequency masking. Furthermore, we develop an efficient framework for evaluating their Lipschitz constants and analytically derive these constants for some of the proposed architectures. As an application, we propose CoReM-LipsAM (Controlled Residual Maps via LipsAM) for plug-and-play (PnP) audio signal recovery, integrating a DNN as a data-driven prior within a model-based signal processing algorithm. The convergence of the obtained PnP algorithm is structurally guaranteed by the CoReM-LipsAM architecture and empirically validated through speech dereverberation experiments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23038
Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MSASR) aims to jointly predict content transcriptions, speaker identities, and timestamps, thereby addressing the key question of "who spoke what and when" and holds substantial practical value in real-world multi-speaker scenarios. However, MSASR still encounters considerable challenges in the presence of fast turn transitions, overlapping speech, and complex, diverse multi-speaker scenarios. In this work, we propose DiaScriber, an end-to-end multi-speaker diarization and transcription model built on a speech large language model. We first construct diverse data pipelines to cover a wide variety of multi-speaker scenarios and their complexities, including validation and refinement, turn-transition and overlapping-speech simulation, and multimodal annotation. Furthermore, DiaScriber is developed based on the pretrained version of Qwen3.5-Omni through a three-stage training strategy involving continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments show that DiaScriber achieves superior performance over comparison methods across extensive multi-speaker scenario test sets and demonstrates outstanding generalization ability in unseen multi-speaker scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22796
Large audio-language models (LALMs) have shown promising progress in understanding speech, music, and general sound events, yet their ability to reason about how audio signals are degraded remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate semantic understanding, event recognition, or high-level audio reasoning, leaving a basic question unanswered: Do LALMs understand the differences in audio quality? We introduce MRMAD, a Multi-Round Multi-Audio Degradation benchmark for evaluating audio degradation perception and understanding in LALMs. MRMAD spans speech, music, and sound, and frames evaluation as multi-turn dialogues over multiple audio inputs, requiring models to identify degradation types, compare severity, and perceive corruption changes across turns. Unlike current single-turn audio-language benchmarks, MRMAD evaluates whether LALMs can maintain consistent degradation hypotheses with new evidence and explain low-level acoustic phenomena in natural language. Through a systematic evaluation of 18 representative LALMs from non-thinking to reasoning and Omni models, we find that current models often recognize coarse content while failing to diagnose, compare, or reason about degradations reliably. MRMAD reveals an important yet overlooked aspect of audio-language understanding and provides a diagnostic foundation for building future LALMs that are robust to real-world acoustic conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22236
Language-queried audio source separation (LASS) aims to extract target sources from audio mixtures according to natural language descriptions, offering a flexible and scalable interface for audio source separation. However, most existing LASS methods rely on discriminative, mask-based models, which estimate masks from the input mixture. These methods often over-suppress target sounds or fail to fully separate them, especially when multiple sound events strongly overlap in complex acoustic scenes. In this work, we propose FlowSep2, a text-conditioned flow-matching generative model for LASS. Instead of directly predicting a separation mask, FlowSep2 learns to generate the target source representation from Gaussian noise in a latent space, conditioned on both the mixture representation and the text query. Specifically, we employ rectified flow matching with a Diffusion Transformer backbone. We further incorporate Self-Flow, a self-supervised flow-matching paradigm, into our LASS framework. By encouraging semantically structured latent representations under the generative objective, Self-Flow improves the model's ability to separate target sources according to text queries. Experiments on multiple LASS benchmarks show that FlowSep2 achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates enhanced sound separation results in challenging scenarios with overlapping sound events.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22111
In sound mixtures of more than one musical source, different vibrato patterns act as a cue that multiple sources are present for both human listeners and source separation algorithms. Matching the vibrato patterns of the signals in the mixture reduces the perception of multiple sources, particularly when the sources play in unison. This work introduces the vibrato matching algorithm, which first suppresses vibrato in a target signal and then transfers vibrato from a source signal to the target. An existing vibrato suppression algorithm is combined with a new algorithm for vibrato transfer, which imparts frequency modulation and amplitude modulation to the harmonics of the target signal, and amplitude modulation onto the spectral envelope of the non-harmonic residual component. Examples demonstrate the algorithm's utility as a vibrato control mechanism and as a tool for blending sound sources. Matching vibrato degrades the performance of source separation algorithms, suggesting a similar degradation in listeners ability to detect the presence of multiple sources.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22057
Tea plantations are vulnerable to Postelectrotermes militaris, commonly known as the Upcountry Live Wood Termite (ULWT), which can cause substantial damage when infestations remain undetected. This study proposes an IoT-enabled acoustic monitoring framework integrated with deep learning for early detection and severity assessment of ULWT infestations in tea plantations. Research Method: Audio signals were captured non-invasively from tea trunks using a high-sensitivity microphone connected to a Raspberry Pi-based IoT device, with geographic coordinates recorded for spatial tracking. After trimming, resampling, and segmentation, 2,000 ten-second samples were obtained, comprising 1,000 healthy and 1,000 infested samples, and divided into 1,600 training, 200 validation, and 200 test samples. The dataset used in this study is publicly available on Kaggle (Senevirathna et al. 2026). Fourier-derived spectrograms trained a CNN for infestation classification and probability estimation. A weighted severity model combined CNN probability, mean acoustic amplitude, and nearby infested plants within 5 m, with geospatial mapping used to visualize infestation distribution. Findings and Values: Field trials in a ULWT-affected tea plantation in Pundaluoya demonstrated feasibility under realistic environmental noise. On the held-out test set, the CNN achieved 81.5% accuracy, 80.6% precision, 83.0% recall, 81.8% F1-score, and 0.819 ROC-AUC. Beyond binary infestation detection, the framework introduced quantitative severity assessment using infestation probability, acoustic amplitude, and nearby infested plants. The resulting severity and geospatial outputs can support plantation managers in identifying high-risk areas, prioritizing field inspections, and implementing more timely and targeted control measures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27480
Current work in modeling symbolic music primarily relies on representations extracted from MIDI-like data. While such formats allow for modeling symbolic music as sequences of notes, they omit the large space of symbolic annotations common in western sheet music broadly known as expression text, such as tempo or dynamics, which specify time- and velocity-dependent controls on the musical composition and performance. To alleviate this gap, we present MusPyExpress, an extension to the popular symbolic music processing library MusPy that enables the extraction of expression text along with symbolic music for downstream modeling. Utilizing this extension, we parse the PDMX dataset to illustrate the wealth of expression text available in MusicXML datasets. Additionally, we introduce multiple generative tasks, including joint expression-note generation, expression-conditioned music generation, and expression tagging, that take advantage of this additional notational information.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21678
Voice has been proposed as a low-cost screening signal for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD is strongly age-associated and voice changes with age, thus such results admit a trivial alternative explanation. We re-evaluate a public sustained-phonation corpus ($1246$ recordings, $68$ participants) under a strictly participant-level protocol. We therefore evaluate on repeatedly drawn age-matched cohorts and report the discrimination achieved by the confounders themselves on those same cohorts. Where raw (unmodelled) age ($0.510$ $[0.469, 0.551]$) and raw gender ($0.479$) are both measured at chance, acoustic models excluding age retain ROC-AUC $0.717$ $[0.552, 0.859]$ and average precision $0.747$ $[0.581, 0.892]$ against a one-to-one baseline of $0.5$, whereas models containing age fall to $0.531$--$0.679$. The separation is reproduced by two further learners with fixed hyperparameters. Two findings have broader methodological implications: models trained with age transfer less effectively to an age-balanced target cohort than otherwise identical models trained without age, and fourteen classical voice-quality and perturbation measures achieve comparable discrimination to a $55$-dimensional combined representation. We conclude that a non-age acoustic signal is present, that confounding by recording conditions cannot be excluded from the released features, and that the evaluation protocol in standard use cannot distinguish these possibilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21599