pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Non-native Children's Automatic Speech Assessment Challenge (NOCASA)
Authors: Yaroslav Getman, Tamás Grósz, Mikko Kurimo, Giampiero Salvi
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00

This paper presents the "Non-native Children's Automatic Speech Assessment" (NOCASA) - a data competition part of the IEEE MLSP 2025 conference. NOCASA challenges participants to develop new systems that can assess single-word pronunciations of young second language (L2) learners as part of a gamified pronunciation training app. To achieve this, several issues must be addressed, most notably the limited nature of available training data and the highly unbalanced distribution among the pronunciation level categories. To expedite the development, we provide a pseudo-anonymized training data (TeflonNorL2), containing 10,334 recordings from 44 speakers attempting to pronounce 205 distinct Norwegian words, human-rated on a 1 to 5 scale (number of stars that should be given in the game). In addition to the data, two already trained systems are released as official baselines: an SVM classifier trained on the ComParE_16 acoustic feature set and a multi-task wav2vec 2.0 model. The latter achieves the best performance on the challenge test set, with an unweighted average recall (UAR) of 36.37%.
A Generative-AI-Driven Claim Retrieval System Capable of Detecting and Retrieving Claims from Social Media Platforms in Multiple Languages
Authors: Ivan Vykopal, Martin Hyben, Robert Moro, Michal Gregor, Jakub Simko
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking

Online disinformation poses a global challenge, placing significant demands on fact-checkers who must verify claims efficiently to prevent the spread of false information. A major issue in this process is the redundant verification of already fact-checked claims, which increases workload and delays responses to newly emerging claims. This research introduces an approach that retrieves previously fact-checked claims, evaluates their relevance to a given input, and provides supplementary information to support fact-checkers. Our method employs large language models (LLMs) to filter irrelevant fact-checks and generate concise summaries and explanations, enabling fact-checkers to faster assess whether a claim has been verified before. In addition, we evaluate our approach through both automatic and human assessments, where humans interact with the developed tool to review its effectiveness. Our results demonstrate that LLMs are able to filter out many irrelevant fact-checks and, therefore, reduce effort and streamline the fact-checking process.
Cooking Up Creativity: A Cognitively-Inspired Approach for Enhancing LLM Creativity through Structured Representations
Authors: Moran Mizrahi, Chen Shani, Gabriel Stanovsky, Dan Jurafsky, Dafna Shahaf
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at countless tasks, yet struggle with creativity. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that couples LLMs with structured representations and cognitively inspired manipulations to generate more creative and diverse ideas. Our notion of creativity goes beyond superficial token-level variations; rather, we explicitly recombine structured representations of existing ideas, allowing our algorithm to effectively explore the more abstract landscape of ideas. We demonstrate our approach in the culinary domain with DishCOVER, a model that generates creative recipes. Experiments comparing our model's results to those of GPT-4o show greater diversity. Domain expert evaluations reveal that our outputs, which are mostly coherent and feasible culinary creations, significantly surpass GPT-4o in terms of novelty, thus outperforming it in creative generation. We hope our work inspires further research into structured creativity in AI.
WenyanGPT: A Large Language Model for Classical Chinese Tasks
Authors: Xinyu Yao, Mengdi Wang, Bo Chen, Xiaobing Zhao
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Classical Chinese, as the core carrier of Chinese culture, plays a crucial role in the inheritance and study of ancient literature. However, existing natural language processing models primarily optimize for Modern Chinese, resulting in inadequate performance on Classical Chinese. This paper presents a comprehensive solution for Classical Chinese language processing. By continuing pre-training and instruction fine-tuning on the LLaMA3-8B-Chinese model, we construct a large language model, WenyanGPT, which is specifically designed for Classical Chinese tasks. Additionally, we develop an evaluation benchmark dataset, WenyanBENCH. Experimental results on WenyanBENCH demonstrate that WenyanGPT significantly outperforms current advanced LLMs in various Classical Chinese tasks. We make the model's training data, instruction fine-tuning data\footnote, and evaluation benchmark dataset publicly available to promote further research and development in the field of Classical Chinese processing.
DiffusionRIR: Room Impulse Response Interpolation using Diffusion Models
Authors: Sagi Della Torre, Mirco Pezzoli, Fabio Antonacci, Sharon Gannot
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Signal Processing, Data Augmentation, Denoising, Image Inpainting, Sound Source Localization

Room Impulse Responses (RIRs) characterize acoustic environments and are crucial in multiple audio signal processing tasks. High-quality RIR estimates drive applications such as virtual microphones, sound source localization, augmented reality, and data augmentation. However, obtaining RIR measurements with high spatial resolution is resource-intensive, making it impractical for large spaces or when dense sampling is required. This research addresses the challenge of estimating RIRs at unmeasured locations within a room using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM). Our method leverages the analogy between RIR matrices and image inpainting, transforming RIR data into a format suitable for diffusion-based reconstruction. Using simulated RIR data based on the image method, we demonstrate our approach's effectiveness on microphone arrays of different curvatures, from linear to semi-circular. Our method successfully reconstructs missing RIRs, even in large gaps between microphones. Under these conditions, it achieves accurate reconstruction, significantly outperforming baseline Spline Cubic Interpolation in terms of Normalized Mean Square Error and Cosine Distance between actual and interpolated RIRs. This research highlights the potential of using generative models for effective RIR interpolation, paving the way for generating additional data from limited real-world measurements.
ReasonIR: Training Retrievers for Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Rulin Shao, Rui Qiao, Varsha Kishore, Niklas Muennighoff, Xi Victoria Lin, Daniela Rus, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Sewon Min, Wen-tau Yih, Pang Wei Koh, Luke Zettlemoyer
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, MMLU, RAG, Synthetic Data Generation

We present ReasonIR-8B, the first retriever specifically trained for general reasoning tasks. Existing retrievers have shown limited gains on reasoning tasks, in part because existing training datasets focus on short factual queries tied to documents that straightforwardly answer them. We develop a synthetic data generation pipeline that, for each document, our pipeline creates a challenging and relevant query, along with a plausibly related but ultimately unhelpful hard negative. By training on a mixture of our synthetic data and existing public data, ReasonIR-8B achieves a new state-of-the-art of 29.9 nDCG@10 without reranker and 36.9 nDCG@10 with reranker on BRIGHT, a widely-used reasoning-intensive information retrieval (IR) benchmark. When applied to RAG tasks, ReasonIR-8B improves MMLU and GPQA performance by 6.4% and 22.6% respectively, relative to the closed-book baseline, outperforming other retrievers and search engines. In addition, ReasonIR-8B uses test-time compute more effectively: on BRIGHT, its performance consistently increases with longer and more information-rich rewritten queries; it continues to outperform other retrievers when combined with an LLM reranker. Our training recipe is general and can be easily extended to future LLMs; to this end, we open-source our code, data, and model.
Speaker Retrieval in the Wild: Challenges, Effectiveness and Robustness
Authors: Erfan Loweimi, Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill, Mark Gales
Date: 2025-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

There is a growing abundance of publicly available or company-owned audio/video archives, highlighting the increasing importance of efficient access to desired content and information retrieval from these archives. This paper investigates the challenges, solutions, effectiveness, and robustness of speaker retrieval systems developed "in the wild" which involves addressing two primary challenges: extraction of task-relevant labels from limited metadata for system development and evaluation, as well as the unconstrained acoustic conditions encountered in the archive, ranging from quiet studios to adverse noisy environments. While we focus on the publicly-available BBC Rewind archive (spanning 1948 to 1979), our framework addresses the broader issue of speaker retrieval on extensive and possibly aged archives with no control over the content and acoustic conditions. Typically, these archives offer a brief and general file description, mostly inadequate for specific applications like speaker retrieval, and manual annotation of such large-scale archives is unfeasible. We explore various aspects of system development (e.g., speaker diarisation, embedding extraction, query selection) and analyse the challenges, possible solutions, and their functionality. To evaluate the performance, we conduct systematic experiments in both clean setup and against various distortions simulating real-world applications. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the developed speaker retrieval systems, establishing the versatility and scalability of the proposed framework for a wide range of applications beyond the BBC Rewind corpus.
Versatile Framework for Song Generation with Prompt-based Control
Authors: Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, RuiQi Li, Jingyu Lu, Rongjie Huang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Zhiqing Hong, Ziyue Jiang, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00

Song generation focuses on producing controllable high-quality songs based on various prompts. However, existing methods struggle to generate vocals and accompaniments with prompt-based control and proper alignment. Additionally, they fall short in supporting various tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce VersBand, a multi-task song generation framework for synthesizing high-quality, aligned songs with prompt-based control. VersBand comprises these primary models: 1) VocalBand, a decoupled model, leverages the flow-matching method for generating singing styles, pitches, and mel-spectrograms, allowing fast, high-quality vocal generation with style control. 2) AccompBand, a flow-based transformer model, incorporates the Band-MOE, selecting suitable experts for enhanced quality, alignment, and control. This model allows for generating controllable, high-quality accompaniments aligned with vocals. 3) Two generation models, LyricBand for lyrics and MelodyBand for melodies, contribute to the comprehensive multi-task song generation system, allowing for extensive control based on multiple prompts. Experimental results demonstrate that VersBand performs better over baseline models across multiple song generation tasks using objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available at https://aaronz345.github.io/VersBandDemo.
ClonEval: An Open Voice Cloning Benchmark
Authors: Iwona Christop, Tomasz Kuczyński, Marek Kubis
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Cloning

We present a novel benchmark for voice cloning text-to-speech models. The benchmark consists of an evaluation protocol, an open-source library for assessing the performance of voice cloning models, and an accompanying leaderboard. The paper discusses design considerations and presents a detailed description of the evaluation procedure. The usage of the software library is explained, along with the organization of results on the leaderboard.
Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example
Authors: Yiping Wang, Qing Yang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Liliang Ren, Lucas Liu, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Xuehai He, Kuan Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Weizhu Chen, Shuohang Wang, Simon Shaolei Du, Yelong Shen
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Math, Mathematical Reasoning

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward using one training example (1-shot RLVR) is effective in incentivizing the math reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Applying RLVR to the base model Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, we identify a single example that elevates model performance on MATH500 from 36.0% to 73.6%, and improves the average performance across six common mathematical reasoning benchmarks from 17.6% to 35.7%. This result matches the performance obtained using the 1.2k DeepScaleR subset (MATH500: 73.6%, average: 35.9%), which includes the aforementioned example. Similar substantial improvements are observed across various models (Qwen2.5-Math-7B, Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B), RL algorithms (GRPO and PPO), and different math examples (many of which yield approximately 30% or greater improvement on MATH500 when employed as a single training example). In addition, we identify some interesting phenomena during 1-shot RLVR, including cross-domain generalization, increased frequency of self-reflection, and sustained test performance improvement even after the training accuracy has saturated, a phenomenon we term post-saturation generalization. Moreover, we verify that the effectiveness of 1-shot RLVR primarily arises from the policy gradient loss, distinguishing it from the "grokking" phenomenon. We also show the critical role of promoting exploration (e.g., by adding entropy loss with an appropriate coefficient) in 1-shot RLVR training. As a bonus, we observe that applying entropy loss alone, without any outcome reward, significantly enhances Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B's performance on MATH500 by 27.4%. These findings can inspire future work on RLVR data efficiency and encourage a re-examination of both recent progress and the underlying mechanisms in RLVR. Our code, model, and data are open source at https://github.com/ypwang61/One-Shot-RLVR
APG-MOS: Auditory Perception Guided-MOS Predictor for Synthetic Speech
Authors: Zhicheng Lian, Lizhi Wang, Hua Huang
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Automatic speech quality assessment aims to quantify subjective human perception of speech through computational models to reduce the need for labor-consuming manual evaluations. While models based on deep learning have achieved progress in predicting mean opinion scores (MOS) to assess synthetic speech, the neglect of fundamental auditory perception mechanisms limits consistency with human judgments. To address this issue, we propose an auditory perception guided-MOS prediction model (APG-MOS) that synergistically integrates auditory modeling with semantic analysis to enhance consistency with human judgments. Specifically, we first design a perceptual module, grounded in biological auditory mechanisms, to simulate cochlear functions, which encodes acoustic signals into biologically aligned electrochemical representations. Secondly, we propose a residual vector quantization (RVQ)-based semantic distortion modeling method to quantify the degradation of speech quality at the semantic level. Finally, we design a residual cross-attention architecture, coupled with a progressive learning strategy, to enable multimodal fusion of encoded electrochemical signals and semantic representations. Experiments demonstrate that APG-MOS achieves superior performance on two primary benchmarks. Our code and checkpoint will be available on a public repository upon publication.
Pediatric Asthma Detection with Googles HeAR Model: An AI-Driven Respiratory Sound Classifier
Authors: Abul Ehtesham, Saket Kumar, Aditi Singh, Tala Talaei Khoei
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Early detection of asthma in children is crucial to prevent long-term respiratory complications and reduce emergency interventions. This work presents an AI-powered diagnostic pipeline that leverages Googles Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) model to detect early signs of asthma from pediatric respiratory sounds. The SPRSound dataset, the first open-access collection of annotated respiratory sounds in children aged 1 month to 18 years, is used to extract 2-second audio segments labeled as wheeze, crackle, rhonchi, stridor, or normal. Each segment is embedded into a 512-dimensional representation using HeAR, a foundation model pretrained on 300 million health-related audio clips, including 100 million cough sounds. Multiple classifiers, including SVM, Random Forest, and MLP, are trained on these embeddings to distinguish between asthma-indicative and normal sounds. The system achieves over 91\% accuracy, with strong performance on precision-recall metrics for positive cases. In addition to classification, learned embeddings are visualized using PCA, misclassifications are analyzed through waveform playback, and ROC and confusion matrix insights are provided. This method demonstrates that short, low-resource pediatric recordings, when powered by foundation audio models, can enable fast, noninvasive asthma screening. The approach is especially promising for digital diagnostics in remote or underserved healthcare settings.
BrAIcht, a theatrical agent that speaks like Bertolt Brecht's characters
Authors: Baz Roland, Kristina Malyseva, Anna Pappa, Tristan Cazenave
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This project introduces BrAIcht, an AI conversational agent that creates dialogues in the distinctive style of the famous German playwright Bertolt Brecht. BrAIcht is fine-tuned using German LeoLM, a large language model with 7 billion parameters and a modified version of the base Llama2 suitable for German language tasks. For fine-tuning, 29 plays of Bertolt Brecht and 907 of other German plays that are stylistically similar to Bertolt Brecht are used to form a more di-erse dataset. Due to the limited memory capacity, a parameterefficient fine-tuning technique called QLoRA is implemented to train the large language model. The results, based on BLEU score and perplexity, show very promising performance of BrAIcht in generating dialogues in the style of Bertolt Brecht.
A Comparative Study on Positional Encoding for Time-frequency Domain Dual-path Transformer-based Source Separation Models
Authors: Kohei Saijo, Tetsuji Ogawa
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00

In this study, we investigate the impact of positional encoding (PE) on source separation performance and the generalization ability to long sequences (length extrapolation) in Transformer-based time-frequency (TF) domain dual-path models. The length extrapolation capability in TF-domain dual-path models is a crucial factor, as it affects not only their performance on long-duration inputs but also their generalizability to signals with unseen sampling rates. While PE is known to significantly impact length extrapolation, there has been limited research that explores the choice of PEs for TF-domain dual-path models from this perspective. To address this gap, we compare various PE methods using a recent state-of-the-art model, TF-Locoformer, as the base architecture. Our analysis yields the following key findings: (i) When handling sequences that are the same length as or shorter than those seen during training, models with PEs achieve better performance. (ii) However, models without PE exhibit superior length extrapolation. This trend is particularly pronounced when the model contains convolutional layers.
Generative Adversarial Network based Voice Conversion: Techniques, Challenges, and Recent Advancements
Authors: Sandipan Dhar, Nanda Dulal Jana, Swagatam Das
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) stands as a crucial research area in speech synthesis, enabling the transformation of a speaker's vocal characteristics to resemble another while preserving the linguistic content. This technology has broad applications, including automated movie dubbing, speech-to-singing conversion, and assistive devices for pathological speech rehabilitation. With the increasing demand for high-quality and natural-sounding synthetic voices, researchers have developed a wide range of VC techniques. Among these, generative adversarial network (GAN)-based approaches have drawn considerable attention for their powerful feature-mapping capabilities and potential to produce highly realistic speech. Despite notable advancements, challenges such as ensuring training stability, maintaining linguistic consistency, and achieving perceptual naturalness continue to hinder progress in GAN-based VC systems. This systematic review presents a comprehensive analysis of the voice conversion landscape, highlighting key techniques, key challenges, and the transformative impact of GANs in the field. The survey categorizes existing methods, examines technical obstacles, and critically evaluates recent developments in GAN-based VC. By consolidating and synthesizing research findings scattered across the literature, this review provides a structured understanding of the strengths and limitations of different approaches. The significance of this survey lies in its ability to guide future research by identifying existing gaps, proposing potential directions, and offering insights for building more robust and efficient VC systems. Overall, this work serves as an essential resource for researchers, developers, and practitioners aiming to advance the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in voice conversion technology.
Revisiting the MIMIC-IV Benchmark: Experiments Using Language Models for Electronic Health Records
Authors: Jesus Lovon, Thouria Ben-Haddi, Jules Di Scala, Jose G. Moreno, Lynda Tamine
Date: 2025-04-29 00:00:00

The lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks in the medical domain for text inputs can be a barrier to widely adopting and leveraging the potential of natural language models for health-related downstream tasks. This paper revisited an openly available MIMIC-IV benchmark for electronic health records (EHRs) to address this issue. First, we integrate the MIMIC-IV data within the Hugging Face datasets library to allow an easy share and use of this collection. Second, we investigate the application of templates to convert EHR tabular data to text. Experiments using fine-tuned and zero-shot LLMs on the mortality of patients task show that fine-tuned text-based models are competitive against robust tabular classifiers. In contrast, zero-shot LLMs struggle to leverage EHR representations. This study underlines the potential of text-based approaches in the medical field and highlights areas for further improvement.