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4arXiv cs.CL (Computation and Language)·8d ago

Audio-LLM-based data filtering for speech-to-speech translation via Rank-to-Distill

A new arXiv paper proposes using audio large language models to filter noisy training data for end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST). The authors introduce a two-stage Rank-to-Distill strategy: a lightweight ranker generates pseudo-labels from noisy speech pairs, which then supervise an audio-LLM to make keep/drop decisions directly from raw audio. Experiments on CVSS-C and SpeechMatrix benchmarks show up to +1.4 ASR-BLEU improvement over unfiltered baselines.

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5arXiv · cs.CL·10d ago·source ↗

AuRA: Distilling audio understanding into LLMs via LoRA adaptation

AuRA is a new method for integrating speech understanding into LLMs by distilling audio encoding capability directly into LoRA-adapted model weights, bypassing cascaded ASR-LLM pipelines. A lightweight audio embedding layer feeds speech to both an ASR encoder (teacher) and a LoRA-adapted LLM (student), with layer-wise distillation aligning hidden states. The approach claims to outperform cascaded systems, bridge-based adaptation baselines, and large-scale multimodal models on multiple speech-language benchmarks while enabling parallel end-to-end inference without large-scale multimodal training.

5arXiv · cs.CL·17d ago·source ↗

Synthetic LLM-generated conversations improve ASR training for low-resource languages

Researchers propose a pipeline that uses LLMs to generate scenario-level dialogues and TTS to synthesize multi-speaker audio, creating simulated conversational training data for ASR systems. Evaluated on the Hungarian BEA-Dialogue benchmark, a model trained on 67 hours of real plus 636 hours of synthetic data outperforms a zero-shot model trained on 2,700 hours of real Hungarian speech. The study tests five LLM families under multiple budget and mixing configurations using a FastConformer-Large backbone, finding that generator choice and data composition significantly affect gains.

5arXiv · cs.CL·23d ago·source ↗

Towards Reliable Multilingual LLMs-as-a-Judge: An Empirical Study

This paper systematically investigates strategies for extending LLM-based automatic evaluation (LLMs-as-a-Judge) to multilingual settings, covering high-, mid-, and low-resource languages (English, Spanish, Basque). The authors compare instruction translation, monolingual vs. multilingual supervision, and model size, finding that fine-tuned smaller models can match proprietary models when in-domain data is available, while zero-shot larger models are preferable out-of-domain. Two meta-evaluation datasets are extended to Spanish and Basque, and all data and code are publicly released.

4arXiv · cs.CL·25d ago·source ↗

WhoSaidIt: Human-LLM Collaborative Annotation for Multilingual Speaker-Attribute Classification

This paper proposes a human-LLM collaborative re-annotation framework for stabilizing noisy multilingual speaker-attribute labels under resource constraints. LLMs surface recurring annotation rationales through iterative expert interaction, combined with disagreement-focused sampling for targeted re-annotation. The resulting WhoSaidIt dataset covers nine speaker-attribute labels across multiple languages. Benchmarking of recent LLMs reveals substantial cross-lingual annotation divergence and highlights both capabilities and limitations of LLMs in this classification task.

5arXiv · cs.CL·10d ago·source ↗

RL-based alignment improves interactivity in full-duplex spoken dialogue models

Researchers propose a post-training alignment method using reinforcement learning to improve interactivity in full-duplex spoken dialogue models, which can listen and speak simultaneously. The method addresses four canonical axes of interactivity—pause handling, turn-taking, backchanneling, and user interruption—each with axis-specific reward functions, plus an LLM-based reward to prevent semantic degradation. The approach is applied to two open-source models, Moshi and PersonaPlex, showing consistent improvements in both offline and real-time multi-turn evaluation.

4arXiv · cs.CL·17d ago·source ↗

AlignAtt4LLM adapts simultaneous speech translation policy to decoder-only LLMs for IWSLT 2026

Researchers present AlignAtt4LLM, a simultaneous speech translation system for IWSLT 2026 covering English to German, Italian, and Chinese. The system cascades Qwen3-ASR for incremental transcription with Gemma-4 E4B-it for translation, applying a novel AlignAtt policy adapted for decoder-only LLMs that lack encoder-decoder cross-attention. Key contributions include explicit source span prompting, offline alignment head selection, and query/key capture to recover a usable attention-based read/write policy. The system outperforms IWSLT 2026 baselines for European language pairs in both low- and high-latency regimes.

5arXiv · cs.CL·9d ago·source ↗

Study finds optimal speech token frame rate for aligning speech with text-native LLM reasoning

Researchers identify a temporal-granularity mismatch as a key cause of reasoning degradation in spoken dialogue models: speech tokens are far longer than text under matched semantics, diluting per-token semantic density. The paper introduces factorized FSQ and a non-autoregressive audio LM head to enable low frame rates, then sweeps frame rates from 50Hz down to 2.08Hz under a frozen LLM backbone. Results show a consistent optimal regime at 4.17Hz with intermediate-layer representation alignment for speech QA tasks.

6arXiv · cs.CL·19d ago·source ↗

DOA: Training-Free Decoder-Only Attention Policy for Long-Form Simultaneous Speech Translation with SpeechLLMs

The paper proposes Decoder-Only Attention (DOA), a training-free streaming policy for simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SimulST) that works with off-the-shelf decoder-only Speech LLMs. DOA derives proxy alignment signals from self-attention rather than cross-attention, enabling long-form simultaneous translation without retraining. Experiments on Phi4-Multimodal and Qwen3-Omni demonstrate low-latency performance approaching offline decoding quality, validating that decoder self-attention contains sufficient alignment information for streaming decisions.