Submarine fiber-optic cables instrumented with distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) provide an effective approach for large-scale monitoring of fin whales. We present an end-to-end workflow for detecting, characterizing, and localizing fin whale notes, tested on two submarine telecom cables in the Strait of Gibraltar and western Alboran Sea. The workflow applies a kurtosis-value picker adapted to narrow-band fin whale notes. Channel-wise detections are grouped into individual notes using density-based spatio-temporal clustering, cluster agglomeration, and hyperbolic fitting to reject incoherent picks. The retained clusters are characterized through temporal, spectral, and energy-related descriptors that support note-type discrimination and estimation of inter-note intervals. Relative arrival times across DAS channels are then used in a grid-search procedure to estimate candidate source locations. Evaluation against manually annotated detections from six fin whale songs yielded median pick-level precision of 0.990 and recall of 0.744, and median cluster-level precision of 0.880 and recall of 0.806. Representative applications demonstrate separation of overlapping vocalizations, characterization of type-A and type-B notes, and the inference of apparent source movement. By transforming dense DAS recordings into compact note-level bioacoustic information, the workflow provides an integrated framework for fin whale monitoring and a basis for adaptation to other synchronized acoustic receiver arrays.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02387
Sounding Canvas turns painting into a touch-responsive multimodal installation by embedding capacitive sensors, real-time decision models, and networking inside the canvas. Touches trigger spatialised sounds that appear to emanate from the painting itself. The work embeds algorithms physically, as sensing and computation concealed behind the artwork; perceptually, through an offline visual-to-sonic mapping that aligns a painting's features with sound descriptors; and performatively, through online models that shape live interaction with visitors and with remote canvases over a network. We describe the artistic rationale and technical implementation, combining a CNN-based offline mapping that defines the sound vocabulary with two online event managers, a higher-order Markov model and an LSTM-based policy, that balance responsiveness with guided exploration. We discuss how these layers make algorithms perceptible through behaviour rather than code, how networking transforms solitary touch into distributed co-authorship, and how the system raises questions of authorship, agency, and evaluation in embedded algorithmic artworks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02219
Artificial intelligence offers substantial potential for acoustic monitoring of animals, from welfare assessment in precision livestock farming to wildlife conservation and ecological research, where vocalizations can indicate health, stress, and social states earlier and at lower cost than manual observation. However, recordings in these settings are obtained under uncontrolled conditions, including environmental noise, reverberation, overlapping calls, and sensors that degrade without notice. As a consequence, automated classification of animal vocalizations remains challenging, and the two dominant acoustic representations show complementary limitations: raw waveforms preserve temporal microstructure but degrade under clipping and reverberation, while log-Mel spectrograms capture harmonic organization but lose phase information and are sensitive to broadband noise. To address these challenges, we propose Uncertainty-Aware Fusion (UAF), a dual-stream framework that estimates Gaussian uncertainty for each representation and fuses them via uncertainty weighting. This mechanism assigns greater weight to the more confident representation with no reliability labels required. In a cross-species, identity-based evaluation excluding all individuals seen during training, UAF (mean pooling) achieves 59.4\% accuracy / 39.7\% macro F1 on the 17-class SoundWel pig vocalization benchmark and 73.1\% accuracy / 71.5\% macro F1 on the 3-class DogBark dataset, outperforming static-concatenation fusion by 15.7\% and 20.4\% relative macro F1, respectively. Ablations over four temporal aggregation strategies show that uncertainty fusion, rather than the temporal characteristics of animal calls, is the primary driver of the performance gain.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02104
This technical report describes Botnoi Group's methodology and results for rapidly fine-tuning the open-source NVIDIA Canary 180M Flash and NVIDIA Canary 1B Flash multitask models for speech-to-text tasks using the NVIDIA NeMo framework, with a focus on telephony-grade audio. To support this adaptation, we construct a telephony-oriented fine-tuning dataset from live voicebot system recordings and prompted speech with telephony-oriented augmentation. We evaluate four targeted experiments-language adaptation (Thai), telephony robustness, domain-specific jargon (names and addresses), and latency-using character error rate (CER) for accuracy and real-time factor (RTFx) for inference speed. Results show that fine-tuning substantially improves recognition in noisy telephony environments, reducing CER from 23.31% to 9.04% on BOTNOI telephony data, and further improves business-critical names and addresses from 16.98% to 3.78% CER through domain-specific adaptation. Overall, our results show that domain-adaptive fine-tuning enhances business-critical terminology while preserving real-time responsiveness for production voicebot deployments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24916
Recent audio-video generators can produce semantically plausible and apparently synchronized sound, yet may still violate the acoustic processes implied by visible events and environments. Existing benchmarks provide limited support for attributing such violations to particular acoustic processes and quantifying their severity. We introduce AcoustiTrace, a diagnostic benchmark that formalizes acoustic physical realism in audio-video generation. AcoustiTrace organizes text-to-audio-video (T2AV) and image-to-audio-video (I2AV) evaluation around the acoustic process, covering sound generation, propagation environment, and acoustic reception through eight dimensions grounded in measurable acoustic quantities. Based on these evaluation dimensions, we construct a large-scale dataset organized around acoustic mechanisms, comprising real-world audio-video recordings and acoustically annotated RGB-D observations, and use it to develop targeted prompt suites and validated evaluators. Experiments reveal that even leading generators still struggle with fundamental acoustic processes despite producing plausible sound events. Finally, we show that the diagnostics AcoustiTrace provides for specific acoustic relations can guide model refinement toward more physically faithful audio and open new directions for incorporating acoustic principles into training objectives, reward modeling, and candidate selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02035
Speech and audio generation is often needed in animation dubbing, audio drama, movies, advertising, games, podcasts, and short-video production. In these scenarios, creators may need to design voices without reference recordings, control speaker styles with natural language, support acoustic scenes with environments and audio effects, and later reuse the designed voices. Therefore, it is important to support multi-speaker speech and audio generation for both instruct and zero-shot tasks. The instruct task requires a caption of the environment, speaker styles, and fine-grained content, while the zero-shot task uses reference audio together with the same fine-grained content. We address these tasks from both the data and model sides. First, we propose SwanData-Caption, which cleans raw speech and audio data, adds targeted synthetic coverage, and annotates diverse and accurate multi-level captions. Then, we propose SwanTale, a multi-speaker expressive speech and audio generation model that supports both zero-shot and instruct tasks. We introduce SwanVAE to support high-quality multi-audio-modality generation. Then, we adopt reward-conditioned quality control and Engram conditioning, along with Unified MoE for multi-task and multi-audio-modality modeling. In addition, we use curriculum learning and GRPO post-training to let the model progressively learn and strengthen its capabilities. Experimental results show that SwanTale leads on multiple key zero-shot and instruct metrics, achieves the best expressiveness scores in both tasks, and supports complex instruct generation involving multi-speaker speech and audio. Demos can be found at this https URL\#swantale.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.02023
MIDI-to-Music system renders the melody and rhythm of a target MIDI sequence into musical segment while cloning instrument timbre from a prompt recording. Existing systems typically adopt one of two distinct paradigms: conditional generation with prompt audio alone, which remains applicable when aligned prompt MIDI is unavailable, and In-Context Learning with paired prompt audio and MIDI, which exploits cross-modal alignment for stronger control on MIDI following and timbre similarity. We introduce P-MUSE, an instrumental MIDI-to-Music framework that unifies both paradigms via a multi-stage Curriculum-Learning supporting prompt-MIDI-optional inputs. P-MUSE further unifies music generation and local editing through a shared fill-in-the-middle formulation. Grounded in theoretical analysis and empirical study, we propose a phase-aware classifier-free guidance scheduling principle for Transcription-to-Audio systems, alongside a Tail-Drop strategy. Finally, to advance research in this field, we establish the first comprehensive benchmark, covering various prompt modes, generation/editing tasks, and four representative instruments: piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Demos are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01920
This paper describes the participation of team "Go-To-Germany" in the ImageCLEF 2026 Audio Deepfake Detection and Generation task. Our detection system, built on a four-backbone self-supervised learning (SSL) ensemble combining WavLM-Large, Wav2Vec2-XLS-R-300M, ECAPA-TDNN, and x-vector representations, achieved a final score of 0.9522 on the official ImageCLEF 2026 evaluation, with perfect accuracy (1.0000) on participant-generated deepfakes and 0.8875 on the held-out organizer ground-truth real data. For the Generation sub-task, our official team submission, an F5-TTS v1 baseline processed with a uniform reverberation pass and submitted as a deliberate anti-forensic probe, ranked first with a final score of 0.4304 (word error rate (WER) 4.99%, character error rate (CER) 2.07%); details of our four-model program (GLM-TTS, F5-TTS, XTTS v2, CosyVoice3), from which the official entry was drawn, appear in the paper. We present a cross-track analysis revealing a pronounced asymmetry: our detection system identifies 100% of participant-generated deepfakes, while our official generation entry, despite ranking first in the Audio Generation sub-task and evading 61.4% and 56.2% of participant and organizer detectors, attains a Final Score of 0.4304 against 0.9522 on the Detection side. We further report falsification-based ablation experiments (LOSO 56-speaker cross-validation, three-region backbone geometry, bootstrap confidence intervals, and PCA analysis) that motivate our architectural-insurance hypothesis for multi-backbone SSL ensembling. We complement these results with five cross-track insights and five pre-registered falsification experiments connecting generation-side evasion to detection-side design decisions, and we openly report an 11.25% false-positive gap on held-out organizer real recordings as the principal open challenge for deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01796
Scoring open-ended music analysis responses is time-consuming and requires nuanced judgments of harmonic knowledge and formal understanding. This study evaluates the validity and repeatability of GPT-4o-mini for rubric-based scoring of music analysis essays, using teacher mean scores as the benchmark. A dataset of 300 university-level student responses was scored by teachers on four dimensions: Harmony, Form, Reasoning, and Terminology. GPT-4o-mini scored the same responses using three prompting strategies: few-shot prompting with chain-of-thought reasoning (Fs+CoT), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and self-consistency based on five internal generations per administration (SC). Each strategy was administered three times with the model, prompt, rubric, and response held constant. Single-pass scores represented an operational scoring condition, whereas median aggregation across three runs was used to examine robustness. Agreement with teacher mean scores was evaluated using correlation, intraclass correlation, Krippendorff's alpha, quadratic weighted kappa, and scoring error indices. Fs+CoT showed the strongest agreement with teacher mean scores in both single-pass scoring and median aggregation. RAG showed systematic over-scoring, whereas SC produced highly repeatable scores but weaker individual-level agreement. Dimension-level analyses showed that scoring performance varied across rubric components, with Terminology generally showing weaker agreement than Reasoning. These findings indicate that GPT-4o-mini can generate stable scores for complex music analysis responses, but prompting strategies produce distinct scoring profiles. Operational use therefore requires strategy-specific calibration, dimension-level validation, and continued human oversight.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01783
Token compression in OmniLLMs is typically posed as a single saliency-ranking problem: score each multimodal token, keep the top-K. We argue this abstraction is mis-specified. The same attention score simultaneously decides two things: how much retained capacity each modality receives, and which tokens within a modality are kept. A shared top-K rule therefore inherits this audio-favoring allocation prior, spending retained capacity on audio before video tokens have a chance to compete. We propose Macer, a training-free compressor that first assigns explicit audio and video budgets, then performs allocation-normalized ranking within each modality at modality-specific shallow layers. Macer significantly reduces token cost while preserving accuracy across audio-grounded, audio--video joint, visual-dominant, and video-centric benchmarks. At 25 % retention, Macer preserves 98.7 % of full-token performance on Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and 97.3 % on Qwen2.5-Omni-3B. On Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, this 25 % setting reaches OmniZip-level performance at 45 % retention while using lower FLOPs. On OmniVinci-9B, the same allocation-before-ranking principle improves over shared top-K ranking by up to 12.9 points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01665
EEG-guided target speaker extraction is challenging under in-trial auditory attention switching, where neural noise and intrinsic latency can delay or destabilize attention tracking. Conventional methods struggle with dynamic switches and often cause discontinuities at switching points. Therefore, we propose SAGE, a switch-aware EEG-guided soft gating framework that treats in-trial switching as dynamic selection. SAGE generates two candidate speech streams with a robust separator and uses an EEG-guided switch-aware gating module to produce smooth fusion weights and suppress transition artifacts. We further integrate latency-compensated alignment and an uncertainty-driven conservative strategy to handle latency discrepancies and fluctuating EEG reliability. SAGE outperforms baselines, achieving 8.67 dB SI-SDR and 88.24% STOI while reducing average switching latency to 2.04 s. By coupling neural decoding with speech separation, it enables robust target extraction in dynamic scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01623
Achieving robust EEG-based auditory attention switch decoding (AASD) is crucial for intelligent hearing aids. However, its application is limited as EEG non-stationarity complicates sequential decision-making, and insufficient control of potential confounding factors may overestimate performance. Therefore, we propose a state-guided adaptive decision (SGAD) framework that infers attention transition states via causal state detection and dynamically modulates temporal smoothing through state-guided adaptive gating. We further introduce six hierarchical evaluation protocols to assess generalization across audio, speaker, and subject dimensions. Experimental results show that SGAD improves decoding accuracy and stability while maintaining low response latency across evaluation scenarios. Performance variations across protocols further suggest data partition-related biases. Together, these findings advance robust AASD for neuro-steered hearing applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01618
Short segments of perceived speech can be retrieved from non-invasive magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings by deep networks trained with a CLIP-style objective against wav2vec 2.0 audio embeddings. Yet their weights do not map onto electrophysiological quantities, and it remains unclear which speech properties drive retrieval. We build on a high-performing MEG-to-audio retrieval architecture but redesign both its front end and decoder. Its spatial attention operates on a flattened sensor layout; we replace it with spherical harmonics defined on the three-dimensional MEG helmet geometry. We reduce the subject-specific representation from 270 to 25 branches, add a temporal filter to each branch to match it to a neuronal source in space and time, and make the convolutional decoder shallower. Ocular and cardiac components are removed before training to reduce the risk of stimulus-locked shortcuts. On MEG-MASC, the model reaches 39.75 +/- 0.34% Top-1 accuracy among 1005 candidates across six trained solutions, with about 20 times fewer decoder parameters. Its weights map to source space, recovering generators consistent with the speech-perception network, while left-lateralized branches carry higher-frequency rhythmic components not evident on the right. Paired MEG occlusion shows that 15 of 19 stimulus features contribute, with the largest effects for silence, sound intensity, vowels, and acoustic onsets. Random word lists behave oppositely: substituting narrative MEG into them improves retrieval, indicating that activity without narrative structure carries less recoverable information than activity during coherent speech. The wav2vec target can be reduced to about twelve learned feature dimensions without loss of accuracy, whereas strong temporal compression causes a clear loss. Together, source mapping and input interventions reveal what drives retrieval.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01481
We present JoyAI-Talker, a full-duplex speech dialogue system that delivers robust foundation model capabilities while empowering empathetic interaction and voice agent intelligence. JoyAI-Talker adopts a modular Thinker-Talker architecture and further implements a unified speech-text joint training pipeline to mitigate the common "cognitive degradation" bottleneck, thereby largely preserving the model's core textual reasoning, STEM, and logical capabilities while extending them to speech-based interaction. For expressive speech synthesis, the Talker module employs a text-controllable generation paradigm that enables natural-language instructions to flexibly control vocal attributes and localized paralinguistic events, such as laughter and sighs, supporting more expressive and fine-grained speech responses. To enhance conversational empathy, we introduce the Persona-Adaptive Empathetic Response (PAER) framework. PAER employs a hierarchical cognitive pipeline to extract non-verbal speaker cues, such as gender, age, and emotional state, from raw input audio, incorporate them into the Thinker's CoT reasoning, and generate context-adaptive responses that align semantically appropriate text with fine-grained control over utterance-level expressiveness and localized paralinguistic events, including sighs, speaking rate, and volume. We further integrate Joy-Duplex, a state-driven, plug-and-play full-duplex framework that functions as an efficient gating engine for real-time turn control. Extensive evaluations show that JoyAI-Talker achieves highly competitive performance on foundational T2T and S2T benchmarks. In full-duplex evaluation, the system reaches a high response rate of 0.88 under user interruptions while maintaining an extremely low false-trigger rate under background speech, demonstrating its readiness for fluid and natural speech dialogue.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01119
Automatic Drum Transcription (ADT) is commonly formulated as a direct mapping from a music mixture to symbolic drum events. While effective for transcription, this formulation discards the acoustic stems that are useful for editing, remixing, and production. We revisit an alternative separate-and-detect formulation, where a drum source separation front end first produces five editable drum stems, and a fixed onset detector then converts each stem into symbolic events. The separator is built on a five-stem latent diffusion model that jointly generates kick, snare, toms, hi-hats, and cymbals in a compact VAE latent space. We further study two training-only auxiliary branches--an onset branch (OB) and a timbre branch (TB)--which shape the separator during learning but are discarded at inference. Trained on synthetic drum multitracks and evaluated on MDB Drums and ENST-Drums, the proposed pipeline consistently improves over a strong U-Net-based drum separation baseline in overall transcription F1. It also outperforms a representative end-to-end ADT system on kick and snare F1 under our evaluation protocol, while additionally providing separated audio stems. The ablation results show that OB gives the most stable transcription gains, whereas TB changes the trade-off between reconstruction, acoustic stem quality, and onset detection. These results suggest that generative drum demixing can serve not only as a source separation model, but also as a practical front end for interpretable drum transcription.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01093
Microphones mounted on UAVs enable aerial acoustic scene analysis applications such as search-and-rescue, wildlife monitoring, and industrial inspection. However, drone rotor noise often dominates the mixture signal at SNRs well below -10 dB, making source recovery extremely challenging. Existing enhancement and source separation methods are typically designed for near-balanced mixtures and degrade substantially in drone audition settings. In this work, we propose DRONEAUDIONET, a drone noise suppression method that reframes a source separation model as a drone noise estimator. To better model drone-dominant mixtures, we introduce a learnable mask-scaling mechanism that allows mask magnitudes beyond unity, together with an additive residual correction term for improved drone estimation and source recovery. We train and evaluate our model on a publicly available drone audition dataset and test generalizability on an out-of-domain dataset with unseen drone hardware and flight modes. Results show that DRONEAUDIONET consistently improves downstream sound classification performance, with the largest gains observed for human vocal sounds. Our findings demonstrate the importance of drone-specific modeling for robust aerial acoustic perception and highlight the potential of source separation methods for real-world drone-assisted search-and-rescue.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00875
The increasing realism of speech generated by text-to-speech and voice conversion systems poses growing challenges to media integrity and voice authentication. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has substantially advanced speech deepfake detection, where downstream backbones conventionally process SSL representations through a single forward pass. This work investigates the practical effectiveness of recurrent hierarchical reasoning for this task. We term this controlled study REIMU and systematically compare conventional single-pass backbones, weight-shared recurrence, homogeneous HRM, and heterogeneous HRM across four Base-scale SSL frontends. We further examine heterogeneous high- and low-level modules that combine self-attention with linear attention. Experiments on the ASVspoof 2019 and 2021 evaluation sets show that recurrence and hierarchical decomposition do not inherently improve detection, whereas heterogeneous operator assignment provides a more competitive configuration. Notably, the heterogeneous design remains competitive while using 10.8\% fewer downstream parameters than the matched baseline, demonstrating its potential for parameter-efficient speech deepfake detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00857
Wearable silent speech interfaces (SSIs) are limited to small, closed vocabularies. Approaches achieving larger vocabularies require obtrusive hardware such as facial electrodes. We present SoniSpeech, the first large-scale, open-vocabulary, trimodal dataset for wearable SSI using acoustic-sensing eyewear. It contains 34 hours across 18,000 utterances with three synchronized modalities: ultrasound echo profiles, voiced audio, and frontal video, in both voiced and silent modes. The corpus draws from the SODA dialogue dataset, providing contemporary conversational English with 5,356 unique words and full phoneme coverage. A CTC-based ResNet-34 baseline achieves 26.3% word error rate (WER) on open-vocabulary silent speech recognition, the first benchmark for this task. Dataset is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00803
High-polyphony symbolic music is increasingly used in generation, analysis, and arrangement, yet many downstream tasks require bounded representations with fixed tracks or slots. Converting richly orchestrated scores into compact forms is therefore necessary, but existing approaches relying on heuristic simplification or generic representation-space reduction often fail to preserve structural roles, orchestration compatibility, and playability under strict budgets. To address the issue, this study reformulates the compression problem as a fixed-budget structured routing problem and proposes Unbalanced Optimal Transport for Information Routing (UOT-IR), a training-free framework based on constrained unbalanced optimal transport. UOT-IR combines an orchestration prior, adaptive marginal relaxation, temporal decoding, and playability-aware projection to produce compact and musically coherent bounded representations. This work further studies two practical settings under the same slot budget: template standardization, which maps each input to a predefined bounded template, and adaptive preservation, which retains representative content without assuming an external template. Experiments on the SymphonyNet corpus show that UOT-IR delivers strong overall performance across both settings, including the best Note-F1 in adaptive preservation (0.9120), together with the lowest structural cost (14.7165) and bad structural confusion rate (0.3406) in template standardization. This work establishes a principled paradigm for fixed-budget symbolic music compression, offering a practical path toward compact, structured, and musically coherent symbolic representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00576
Bandwidth extension (BWE) aims to recover missing high-frequency content from band-limited speech. Existing methods often formulate BWE as a fixed or predefined bandwidth conversion problem, potentially requiring cutoff-specific models or retraining when the input bandwidth changes. This assumption limits their applicability to practical scenarios where speech may arrive with diverse cutoff frequencies. We propose AnyBand, a unified BWE framework that recasts bandwidth extension as in-context spectral infilling. Motivated by prompt-based zero-shot speech generation, AnyBand conditions high-frequency generation on the observed low-frequency spectrum, using the available band as a frequency-domain prompt that conveys content, speaker, prosodic, and spectral-envelope cues. This formulation enables a single model to perform cutoff-conditioned generation over a continuous range of input bandwidths. AnyBand is trained with missing-band conditional flow matching and an Easy-to-Balanced cutoff curriculum over continuously sampled cutoff frequencies. To better exploit the spectral prompt, we introduce a frequency-aware Diffusion Transformer that models cross-frequency interactions and long-range temporal dependencies, followed by a physically motivated multi-view adversarial refinement stage to enhance spectral realism, envelope coherence, and harmonic consistency. Experiments on multiple datasets and bandwidth settings show that AnyBand consistently improves spectral reconstruction over existing baselines while achieving competitive perceptual quality across both standard and irregular input cutoffs. Audio samples are available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00572