VStyle: A Benchmark for Voice Style Adaptation with Spoken Instructions
Authors: name: Jun Zhan; name: Mingyang Han; name: Yuxuan Xie; name: Chen Wang; name: Dong Zhang; name: Kexin Huang; name: Haoxiang Shi; name: DongXiao Wang; name: Tengtao Song; name: Qinyuan Cheng; name: Shimin Li; name: Jun Song; name: Xipeng Qiu; name: Bo Zheng
Published: 2025-09-09 14:28:58

Abstract: Spoken language models (SLMs) have emerged as a unified paradigm for speech
understanding and generation, enabling natural human machine interaction.
However, while most progress has focused on semantic accuracy and instruction
following, the ability of SLMs to adapt their speaking style based on spoken
instructions has received limited attention. We introduce Voice Style
Adaptation (VSA), a new task that examines whether SLMs can modify their
speaking style, such as timbre, prosody, or persona following natural language
spoken commands. To study this task, we present VStyle, a bilingual (Chinese &
English) benchmark covering four categories of speech generation: acoustic
attributes, natural language instruction, role play, and implicit empathy. We
also introduce the Large Audio Language Model as a Judge (LALM as a Judge)
framework, which progressively evaluates outputs along textual faithfulness,
style adherence, and naturalness, ensuring reproducible and objective
assessment. Experiments on commercial systems and open source SLMs demonstrate
that current models face clear limitations in controllable style adaptation,
highlighting both the novelty and challenge of this task. By releasing VStyle
and its evaluation toolkit, we aim to provide the community with a foundation
for advancing human centered spoken interaction. The dataset and code are
publicly available at
https://junzhan2000.github.io/VStyle.github.io/{project's homepage}.