MoDiCoL: A modular continual learning dataset for diagnosing ASR robustness under distribution shift
Researchers introduce MoDiCoL, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate automatic speech recognition robustness under co-occurring real-world distribution shifts including accents, recording conditions, speech impairments, and noise. Unlike existing benchmarks that isolate these factors, MoDiCoL enables controlled analysis across linguistic, speaker, and acoustic dimensions simultaneously. The paper also proposes a continual learning curriculum simulating incremental updates and evaluates three continual learning strategies for robustness acquisition and forgetting.
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Continual learning approach for disfluency-aware ASR with explicit disfluency tokens
A new arXiv preprint addresses the challenge of transcribing disfluent speech (hesitations, repetitions, fillers) in ASR systems, which typically omit such markers causing information loss. The authors introduce explicit disfluency tokens into a pretrained ASR model and apply continual learning to adapt across datasets with varying disfluency distributions while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. The work identifies a trade-off between disfluency marker learning and general ASR performance, and finds a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across continual learning methods.
AgentCL: A Rigorous Evaluation Framework for Continual Learning in Language Agents
AgentCL is a new benchmark and evaluation framework designed to rigorously assess continual learning in language agents, addressing gaps in existing benchmarks that focus on retrieval over long-context documents or use naive task streams with limited cross-task analysis. The framework constructs compositional task streams where earlier sub-solutions, evidence, or workflows are intentionally reusable in later tasks, contrasting them with naive streams to measure transfer gains. The authors also introduce MemProbe, a probing method that stores interactions, insights, and skills while filtering unreliable experiences during consolidation. Empirical results across coding, deep research, and language understanding tasks show that controlled streams better distinguish memory design quality, and that naive streams can mask memory-induced degradation.
AGDO: Attention-guided denoising and optimization framework improves diffusion language model reasoning
Researchers propose AGDO, a framework that replaces random masking in diffusion large language models (dLLMs) with attention-guided denoising order and token weighting during fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. The work is motivated by an empirical finding that tokens with stronger attention to unmasked context are more stable and critical for reasoning. Experiments on math and coding benchmarks show AGDO outperforms existing post-training methods for dLLMs, advancing the case for attention-aware training in parallel-decoding language models.
SARDI: Self-Augmenting Retrieval for Diffusion Language Models using lookahead tokens
Researchers introduce SARDI, a training-free RAG framework for discrete diffusion language models that repurposes discarded low-confidence tokens during denoising as lookahead signals to guide retrieval before output is finalized. The method is retriever-agnostic and applicable to any reasoning-capable discrete diffusion LM. Evaluated across five multi-hop QA benchmarks, SARDI outperforms training-free diffusion and autoregressive retrieval baselines at up to 8x higher throughput.
IndicContextEval: Benchmark for context utilisation in Audio LLMs across 8 Indic languages
Researchers introduce IndicContextEval, a 56-hour multilingual speech benchmark covering 555 speakers across 8 Indian languages and 23 professional domains, designed to test whether Audio LLMs genuinely use textual context (domain descriptions, entity lists) or rely on parametric knowledge. The benchmark employs a 7-level prompting framework that progressively introduces contextual signals including adversarial prompts with incorrect entities. Evaluation of five models reveals substantial variation in context utilisation behaviour, exposing a gap in existing ASR benchmarks that test only fixed prompting conditions.
AudioDER: Deduplication-enhanced reasoning dataset for post-training large audio-language models
Researchers introduce AudioDER, a ~191k-sample post-training dataset for Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) built via an acoustic similarity-based deduplication pipeline to reduce redundancy and improve corpus diversity. Each sample pairs an audio clip with a multiple-choice question, answer candidates, a caption, and a chain-of-thought rationale generated by Qwen3-30B. Post-training Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct on AudioDER yields consistent gains on audio reasoning benchmarks including MMAU-mini, MMSU, and MMAR. The work addresses a data quality gap in audio-language training rather than proposing a new model architecture.
MoE architecture improves self-supervised speech model robustness for anti-spoofing
Researchers propose converting a self-supervised speech representation model into a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve generalization in synthetic speech detection. Feed-forward blocks in selected encoder layers are replaced by expert networks with a layer-wise gating mechanism, allowing complementary acoustic pattern capture while preserving pretrained representations. Evaluated across 14 spoofing datasets, the approach reduces macro Equal Error Rate from 5.46% to 4.81%, an 11.9% relative improvement over the baseline.
Canonical-Context On-Policy Distillation (CCOPD) for Multi-Turn LLM Consistency
This paper identifies 'self-anchored drift' as a key failure mode in multi-turn LLMs: when information is revealed incrementally across turns, models produce unsupported assumptions that distort final answers, even when the total evidence is identical to a single-prompt setting. The authors propose Canonical-Context On-Policy Distillation (CCOPD), which trains a student model on incremental multi-turn conversations to match the output distribution of a frozen teacher conditioned on the full clean prompt. Trained only on math conversations, CCOPD achieves a 32% average relative improvement on multi-turn (RAW-SHARDED) tasks and generalizes zero-shot to five out-of-domain task families while preserving single-prompt performance.