Audio generation has long been fragmented, with speech, music, and sound effects produced by domain-specific models that fail to jointly generate coherent audio scenes from a single description. The key obstacles are insufficient fine-grained supervision for real-world mixed audio and limited acoustic representations for modeling concurrent audio components. We present Dasheng AudioGen, a unified framework for generating general mixed-audio scenes from text. Dasheng AudioGen introduces structured multi-view captions, which explicitly decouple complex acoustic scenes into complementary description views, thereby enabling fine-grained control over audio layers. Furthermore, we employ a high-dimensional unified semantic-acoustic representation as the shared latent space. It injects semantic priors that facilitate cross-modal training convergence, while its high-dimensional feature space provides sufficient capacity to disentangle and fuse concurrent audio components effectively. With these designs, a simple flow-matching DiT achieves high-quality end-to-end audio scene generation. We also establish a comprehensive evaluation pipeline for audio scene generation. Experiments demonstrate that Dasheng AudioGen achieves performance approaching real-world recordings in mixed-audio categories, while remaining competitive with specialized models in single-type generation tasks. Demos are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27838
Audio large language models (Audio LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on speech understanding tasks, yet their ability to understand paralinguistic information remains limited. To systematically quantify this issue, we introduce VoxParadox, an adversarial benchmark with 2,000 verified examples, spanning 10 paralinguistic tasks, created with controlled speech synthesis to intentionally mismatch transcript claims and speaking style, enabling direct measurement of speech paralinguistic understanding. Evaluation of a diverse set of Audio LLMs reveals consistently low accuracy on acoustic ground truth and a strong tendency to follow language-implied (incorrect) answers. To understand the cause of this gap, we perform layer-wise probing and find that (i) paralinguistic cues can degrade in deeper encoder layers and at the encoder--LLM interface, and (ii) even when such cues are available in audio tokens, the language model frequently ignores them. To address these problems, we propose Prompt-Conditioned Layer Mixer (PCLM), which adaptively combines information from multiple audio layers based on the input prompt, and pair it with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to explicitly prefer acoustically supported options over language-implied alternatives. These methods substantially improve Audio LLM paralinguistic understanding, improving Audio Flamingo 3 from 17.40% to 65.20% on VoxParadox, and from 37.74% to 54.78% on MMSU paralinguistic subset. Our project page is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27772
Audio-visual large language models (LLMs) hold strong promise for long-form video understanding, yet their long-video inference is fundamentally limited by the linear growth of video tokens and key-value (KV) caches. We present OmniMem, a memory-efficient streaming framework designed specifically for audio-visual LLMs. Unlike existing compression methods that treat all tokens uniformly, OmniMem introduces a modality-aware memory allocation strategy that separately manages visual and audio contexts, addressing the severe token imbalance between the two modalities. OmniMem further preserves informative and non-redundant KV states through perturbation-aware memory selection, enabling compact memory without sacrificing long-range understanding. To strengthen compression under realistic deployment constraints, we also explore budget-aware fine-tuning, which encourages the model to consolidate useful information into retained memory. Experiments on VideoMME Long, LVBench, and LVOmniBench with video-SALMONN 2+ and Qwen-2.5-Omni show that OmniMem consistently improves over strong training-free compression baselines by 2-4% absolute accuracy under the same memory budgets, with an additional 1-2% gain after fine-tuning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07577
Current music similarity models typically compute a single, monolithic score, entangling distinct musical dimensions like melody, rhythm, and timbre. This limits user control and interpretability, making it impossible to execute nuanced queries. We introduce MERIT, a framework for learning disentangled, factor-specific music representations tailored to these three core dimensions. To overcome the lack of isolated musical variations in real-world audio, we use a novel training strategy that uses conditional audio generation and source-separated stems to strongly encourage single-factor variation in training data. Our evaluations demonstrate strong factor-wise disentanglement. Each head responds strongly to its intended perceptual dimension while remaining near chance on the others, a representational property that holds across both the synthetic training domain and independent real-world audio.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27346
Large audio language models (LALMs) process both speech and environmental acoustic cues, yet struggle to retain non-speech information across multi-turn interactions. The performance gap between semantic (speech) and acoustic (non-speech) understanding remains poorly understood, and the underlying mechanisms of representation and retrieval are still unclear. This work introduces EnvMem, a controlled multi-turn benchmark designed to study this gap and identify the root causes of failures at the representation (i.e., latent embeddings) and retrieval levels (i.e., attention allocation). We further conduct post-hoc interventions to probe representational structure and attention dynamics. Our results reveal representational trajectory drift as the key failure mode, while showing that attention allocation plays a limited role in explaining the observed degradation. Overall, we provide a systematic framework for analyzing and improving non-linguistic memory in long-context LALMs, shedding light on future data and training design for robust acoustic memory modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27039
Traditional RGB-based speech generation faces Temporal Granularity Mismatch since fixed camera exposure times inevitably blur the high-frequency articulatory transients essential for rendering emotional speech. To break this ceiling, we propose EventSpeech as a novel text-conditioned framework pioneering the use of neuromorphic events for expressive speech generation, since these microsecond-precise events naturally align with acoustic waveform dynamics. Our architecture integrates a dedicated Event Encoder to model sparse neuromorphic events alongside a multi-scale Audio Encoder featuring a Hierarchical Wavelet Contextualizer (HWC). A bidirectional alignment mechanism seamlessly synchronizes linguistic content and visual dynamics with dense acoustic features. Furthermore, we construct EVT-SPK as the first benchmark comprising large-scale synthetic data and real-world recordings from specialized neuromorphic hardware. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EventSpeech significantly outperforms current baselines by preserving fine-grained emotions and resisting motion blur to establish a new paradigm for multimodal speech generation. Code and demo are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26672
As policy catches up with the capabilities of generative AI, watermarking is central to content provenance efforts. Inference-time watermarks for autoregressive models are unfit for continuous modalities due to discretization inconsistencies. Existing methods overcome this by finetuning the modality tokenizers, nullifying the watermark's training-free advantage. In this work, motivated by the vocabulary redundancy of discretization, we propose an elegant solution for powerful and robust watermarking of synthetic audio. We theoretically analyze the impact of token errors on watermark detection, and effectively mitigate them using a reduced vocabulary obtained via community detection. Thorough experiments showcase that our gradient-free method can boost detectability by several orders of magnitude, while also achieving built-in robustness to audio modifications. Broadly, we discover a new state-of-the-art for token-level watermarks in multimedia, which simply arises from the nature of discrete representation learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25967
In recent years, thanks to advances in automatic music transcription (AMT), several large-scale datasets of automatically transcribed piano solo music have been released. While these datasets undoubtedly offer extensive material for performance studies, they vary substantially in quality. In the case of classical music, performances often differ not only in expressive aspects such as tempo, but also in their structural interpretation of the score (including repeat patterns and edition-specific variants). To meaningfully use large-scale transcribed datasets for performance research, transcriptions of the same piece must be grouped according to their underlying structural realisation to support valid comparison. We address this by applying sequence-to-sequence alignment followed by hierarchical clustering: we create pairwise alignments for all pairs of transcriptions of a given piece, and use the alignment cost and (dis)similarity of performed sequence lengths to resolve structural mismatches as features for grouping. We propose this approach as a first step towards automatically evaluating large-scale transcribed datasets that lack ground-truth score and/or audio, shifting the evaluation criterion from truth-based accuracy to musical coherence and plausibility. We demonstrate our score-agnostic approach on around 1,500 transcriptions of 88 compositions from a recently published large-scale transcribed piano performance dataset.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25951
Speech editing and zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) share a similar generative foundation conditioned on speech prompts, yet speech editing demands far stricter local acoustic consistency with surrounding unedited content. While prior work has shown that Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) enables TTS models to acquire functional editing capability, this approach remains fundamentally bottlenecked by imperfect paired editing data and coarse-grained optimization signals. To address these limitations, we propose CosyEdit2, a speech editing model built on a two-stage post-training framework that progresses from supervised editing initialization to editing-oriented Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) over target-speech-free data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CosyEdit2 not only substantially advances speech editing performance, but also unlocks better zero-shot TTS capability, revealing a deeper mutual relationship between the two tasks. Audio samples are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25930
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and the leading cause of dementia, affecting memory, reasoning, communication, and daily functioning. Early diagnosis is particularly important, as timely intervention may help slow cognitive decline and improve patient care. Recent studies have demonstrated that spontaneous speech contains valuable linguistic and acoustic biomarkers associated with dementia. However, existing approaches often rely on independently trained modality-specific models, feature concatenation strategies, ensemble methods, or attention-based fusion mechanisms that do not explicitly maximize the dependency between speech and transcript representations. In this work, we propose a multimodal deep learning framework for automatic dementia detection that jointly exploits speech and transcript information in an end-to-end trainable manner. Specifically, speech recordings are divided into 10-second segments and passed through a pre-trained HuBERT model to extract contextualized acoustic representations. To better capture informative temporal speech characteristics, attentive statistics pooling is employed to aggregate frame-level acoustic embeddings. For the textual modality, transcripts are encoded using a pre-trained BERT model, where the [CLS] token representation is used as the linguistic embedding. The acoustic and textual representations are subsequently combined using an attention-based Audio-Text Fusion (AT-Fusion) mechanism. In addition, we introduce a MINE objective to maximize the mutual information between modalities and improve multimodal representation alignment. The fused multimodal representation is finally used for dementia classification. Experiments conducted on the publicly available ADReSS Challenge and PROCESS-2 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach for speech-based dementia assessment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25540
Speech and audio systems operate in inherently non-stationary environments, yet continual learning (CL) research in this domain, especially in the foundation model era, remains fragmented that fail to account for the coupled, geometry-sensitive nature of acoustic representations. Modern speech foundation models operate over highly entangled, continuous representations that jointly encode linguistic, speaker, and paralinguistic factors within a shared latent space. CL is therefore fundamentally about preserving and evolving shared representation structure rather than retaining isolated task knowledge. In this work, we revisit CL for speech from a representation-centered perspective, and introduce a new taxonomy that organizes CL according to how underlying representation geometry evolves under non-stationary acoustic conditions. We further identify key mismatches between current CL assumptions and speech foundation model behavior, and finally outline a set of open challenges and future research directions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24863
In dynamic acoustic environments with time-varying interferers, effective beamforming requires identifying stationary regions over time. The Capon beamformer, a whitened matched filter constrained to maintain unity gain in the desired direction, theoretically relies on the instantaneous ensemble covariance matrix. Practical implementations rely on the batch Capon (or Sample Matrix Inversion), which estimates the sample covariance matrix (SCM) by averaging over a block of snapshots. This practical approach implicitly assumes that the data within the batch window is stationary and can be coherently combined. In non-stationary settings, a batch approach that averages over fixed or excessively long windows fails, as moving interferers smear the SCM and degrade the beamformer's nulling capabilities. To address this, this paper introduces a temporally segmented distortionless response beamformer. Inspired by the segmented least squares method, which fits piecewise polynomials to data while penalizing excessive segmentation to prevent overfitting, the framework extends practical Capon beamforming by incorporating data-driven temporal segmentation. This formulation minimizes output power while dynamically adapting the SCM estimation windows to local stationarity, offering a principled approach to tracking time-varying interferers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24825
Competitive music transcription models require large amounts of paired audio-score data, which is scarce due to collection costs, alignment difficulty, and copyright restrictions. Meanwhile, vast quantities of unpaired audio recordings and symbolic scores are freely available but have gone unused. We adopt a cycle-consistent translation framework in which a small amount of paired data acts as a minimal anchor, unlocking the full potential of the unpaired pool. We find that: unpaired data yields surprisingly large gains, especially under limited supervision; unpaired audio contributes more than unpaired scores; incorporating unlabeled audio from a new instrument during training improves transcription for that instrument without any paired supervision. Together, these results suggest that scaling unpaired data offers a practical path toward high-quality transcription for instruments where labeled data remains scarce.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24193
Non-intrusive intelligibility prediction estimates how well hearing-impaired listeners understand hearing-aid-processed speech without a clean reference. We study this task in the 3rd Clarity Prediction Challenge using two frozen speech encoders, Canary and WavLM. The central question is not only whether complementary pretrained representations should be combined, but where their interaction should occur. We compare single-backbone baselines, uniform score averaging, pool-late fusion, cross-attention, frame-aligned fusion, and reverse alignment under a shared left/right-preserving binaural framework. Among the compared systems, the best model temporally prepares WavLM with a learnable strided convolution and fuses it with Canary on the coarser Canary timeline before pooling, reaching Eval RMSE 24.96$\pm$0.06 and Eval Corr 0.796$\pm$0.001. Severity, enhancement-system, layer-window, and temporal-shift analyses indicate that coarse local temporal correspondence before pooling is a useful inductive bias for this task.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23619
We address text-assisted speech intelligibility prediction for hearing-impaired listeners in CPC3. Although the target is a sentence-level percentage, it is determined by reference-word recognition outcomes. We formulate prediction as reference-conditioned word-level correctness modeling: a frozen Whisper encoder analyzes degraded speech, a teacher-forced decoder conditions on the canonical transcript, and sentence intelligibility is obtained by averaging predicted correctness probabilities over valid reference words. To complement transcript-conditioned decoder states, we add a word-aligned local acoustic branch based on character-level cross-attention alignment and an utterance-level global acoustic branch for calibration. On the official evaluation set, the decoder baseline obtains RMSE 24.92 and correlation 0.795, while joint fusion improves to incorrect-word F1 0.778, MCC 0.626, correlation 0.806, and RMSE 24.39. A similar trend with Whisper medium suggests that the gain comes from prediction granularity and alignment-aware fusion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23604
Neural speech codecs have become the discrete interface between raw audio and speech language models, yet they remain optimized primarily for acoustic reconstruction fidelity, which leaves emotion-relevant cues vulnerable to being discarded during quantization, limiting the affective capacity of downstream models. We trace this degradation to two mechanisms: reconstruction-driven bit allocation under limited bitrate and cross-stream leakage in concatenation-based codecs, where acoustic gradients can overwrite nominally emotion-reserved dimensions. We propose AffectCodec, an emotion-preserving neural speech codec built on Block-Diagonal Residual Finite Scalar Quantization (BD-RFSQ). By imposing block-diagonal input and output projections over emotion and acoustic subspaces, BD-RFSQ transforms bit allocation from implicit and loss-driven to explicit and structurally guaranteed, while still preserving a flat token interface for downstream speech language models. AffectCodec further combines this structurally constrained quantizer with multi-granularity emotion conditioning and multi-rate training, enabling robust affect preservation at low bitrates. Experiments across multiple emotional speech benchmarks show that AffectCodec substantially improves emotion preservation, especially in the low-bitrate regime, while maintaining competitive acoustic quality and intelligibility. These results suggest that structurally protected quantization is an effective principle for preserving emotion-relevant information and may provide a general route toward attribute-aware neural speech compression.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23373
Gradient-based attribution methods can highlight input regions important for neural network predictions, but their effectiveness for temporal sound event detection in audio classification has not been systematically evaluated. This paper assesses whether integrated gradients (IG) can temporally detect sound events when applied to a classifier trained without temporal supervision. We use synthetic polyphonic audio with ground truth timestamps to measure alignment between IG attributions and event boundaries. On a 10-class domestic sound dataset, IG achieves mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.39, frame-level F1 of 0.52, and Pointing Game accuracy of 82.6\%. For comparison, a framewise CNN trained with weak supervision (FW-WS, clip-level training labels) achieves 0.42 IoU, 0.55 F1, and 97.3\% PG, while a strongly supervised variant (FW-SS, frame-level training labels) reaches 0.45 IoU, 0.58 F1, and 97.9\% PG. Overall, these results suggest that post-hoc IG captures meaningful temporal activity patterns of sound events, with localization performance approaching models that explicitly produce frame-level predictions. All methods substantially outperform random and energy-based baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23293
Evaluating speech generation still relies heavily on human judgments, such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), which are expensive, subjective, and difficult to reproduce at scale. While a few recent studies have begun to explore AudioLLM-based judge models, existing efforts typically target only a narrow set of scenarios (e.g., utterance-level quality or single-turn dialogue) and provide limited coverage of diverse speech generation tasks and evaluation dimensions. In this work, we propose UniSRM, a unified speech reward model that can support multi-dimensional, interpretable reward signals with reliable reasoning. To support training and evaluation, we introduce UniSRM-Data and UniSRM-Bench, covering speech evaluation tasks from utterance-level quality to context-level coherence. Based on this dataset, we present the unified speech reward model, UniSRM, with a two-stage pipeline that enables reasoning-based fine-grained assessment. Furthermore, we introduce Reasoning-Consistent Rewards to improve the reliability of the reasoning process. Experiments show that UniSRM delivers more reliable and human-aligned judgments across a broad range of speech evaluation tasks, offering a practical foundation for scalable and unified evaluation of speech quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23261
Speech deepfake detection has achieved remarkable success in clean environments but faces significant challenges in complex, real-world scenarios where speech is often mixed with background music or noise. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on semantic features from self-supervised learning (SSL) models, which often fail when processing non-speech or mixed-source audio. In this paper, we first introduce MixFake, a large-scale benchmark dataset designed to simulate diverse acoustic environments with varying SNR levels and mixed authenticity components. To address the "semantic-centric" limitation, we propose a Multi-stream Prompt Tuning framework that injects signal-level priors into SSL backbones. By integrating base, frequency, and texture streams through deep prompt injection, our model effectively captures acoustic artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving a 0.95% EER in foreground detection and a substantial 7.72% absolute improvement in complex background detection tasks. Our dataset and code are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23201
Interactive streaming music generation promises the use of generative models for live performance and co-creation that is impossible with offline models. However, SOTA models exist in the discrete-AR regime, requiring industrial levels of compute for both training and inference. In this work, we investigate whether audio diffusion models, with their wide support in the open-source community but non-streaming bidirectional nature, can be repurposed efficiently into interactive models accessible on consumer hardware. By taking a critical look at the modern pipeline for block-wise outpainting diffusion, we identify critical inefficiencies during inference that result in strictly worse computational efficiency than their discrete-AR counterparts. We propose Live Music Diffusion Models (LMDMs), a simple modification of the generative diffusion process that recovers, and then outperforms, the inference complexity of the discrete Live Music Models (LMMs) through block-wise KV Caching. Unlike LMMs, LMDMs further enable stable post-training alignment through our novel ARC-Forcing paradigm, reducing error accumulation without any explicit RL or reward models. We demonstrate the application of LMDMs in a number of creative domains, including text-conditioned generation, sketch-based music synthesis, and jamming. We finally show how LMDMs can be used as a generative instrument in a real artist-AI collaboration, utilizing LMDMs as a "generative delay" to transform musicians' improvisation live for variable timbral effects while running locally on a consumer gaming laptop.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22717