Streaming speech recognizers output a word only after the speaker has finished it, typically 90-400 ms later. For a voice agent every millisecond counts: the sooner the words are outputted, the sooner the agent can start a search or plan its reply. We present Earlybird, a 29M-parameter streaming recognizer (16.8 MB at 4 bits). Earlybird learns from audio cut off at random points, including partway through a word, and is asked to predict every word that is due by then in full, plus a guess of the next two words. Its raw token probabilities give a confidence for every word including the one still being spoken. On clean audiobook speech (LibriSpeech test-clean), the median word is predicted correctly 90 ms before the speaker finishes it, while released streaming models get it 90 to 400 ms after it ends. Earlybird is the earliest on all six test sets we time, covering audiobooks, TED talks, public speech, earnings calls, and synthetic speech. On the same audiobooks, 69% of words are predicted correctly before they end, against 3-25% for the other models. For words still being spoken, confidence is calibrated, with an expected calibration error (ECE) of 3.7 to 5.5. On the eight English Open ASR Leaderboard sets, it is more accurate than Moonshine Tiny on every set and roughly ties Whistle, a model of the same size.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14421
Self-interested intelligent agents that negotiate with humans should interpret nonverbal expressions and adapt their behavior accordingly. However, generic facial-affect models degrade across individuals and contexts, creating a generalization gap. We introduce an affect-adaptive negotiation strategy that incorporates Continual Learning with Imagination for Facial Expression Recognition (CLIFER) to personalize valence-arousal perception in real time. Differential feedback converts changes in valence-arousal direction and intensity into adjustments of the agent's target utility. An asynchronous architecture updates CLIFER in the background during live interaction. In a counterbalanced within-subject study in which 66 participants negotiated with a humanoid robot, the CL-enabled agent achieved significantly higher individual utility and elicited higher participant concession rates than the FaceChannel baseline. The CL condition yielded significantly higher mean arousal estimates, alongside a broader output range. Participant utility and Nash distance did not change significantly between conditions. These outcomes support the practical value of coupling continual affective personalization with differential feedback for real-time negotiation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14247
In open-world recognition, machine learning models not only make predictions on unknown structures ("generalized open-set"), but also continually learn and improve from those predictions over time. Interactive segmentation, despite its access to user feedback, has so far remained confined to the open-set setting. In this work we introduce MEOW, the first framework that turns non-interactive segmentation backbones into interactive open-world learners without updating learnable model parameters. MEOW combines parameter-free transductive reasoning with memory consolidation to accumulate knowledge and thereby improve future performance. Focusing on medical data, we show that MEOW consistently improves its own predictions on classes never seen during training, and transfers zero-shot to unfamiliar domains, including micro-CT data and other imaging modalities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13935
Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is traditionally formulated as a vision-centric problem, where inference relies on rich visual representations extracted from images. In this work, we revisit this assumption by introducing text-only RSSC, a new problem setting that investigates whether remote sensing scenes can be recognized using only textual semantic representations. To enable this study, we propose SeProRS, which reformulates RSSC as a text-only classification task through semantic proxy generation. Specifically, a vision-language model (VLM) is first employed to convert remote sensing images into textual descriptions, termed semantic proxies, which are then encoded by a text embedding model for scene classification. This decoupled pipeline provides a unified and reproducible benchmark for evaluating text-only scene understanding. Furthermore, we investigate representative prompting strategies and proxy generators, and analyze their impact on classification performance, text embedding behavior, cross-generator transferability, and efficiency. Extensive experiments on three well-known RSSC datasets show that semantic proxies can preserve substantial discriminative information, while also revealing inherent limitations of purely text-based scene understanding. This paper does not aim to replace image-based RSSC, but instead establishes a new research direction by quantifying the feasibility and boundaries of semantic proxy-based scene recognition. The proposed benchmark and analysis provide a foundation for future research on efficient and modality-reduced remote sensing scene understanding. The source code and datasets will be accessible at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13851
We present Alania-2, a Turkish text-to-speech (TTS) system with two built-in voices, voice design from text descriptions, and two kinds of voice cloning. Alania-2 is a 488M-parameter model with the VoxCPM architecture, which generates continuous audio latents with a diffusion head on top of a language-model backbone. We train it from scratch on 18,195 hours of Turkish speech, 90% of which is synthetic speech produced by a larger teacher model and filtered automatically. A text normalizer rewrites numbers, abbreviations and foreign names into the words a Turkish speaker would say; without it, none of 96 test sentences with digits kept all its critical parts, such as an amount or a date, through synthesis and speech recognition, against 86 with it. On Freya-TR-Eval, a public benchmark of 495 Turkish sentences scored with automatic speech recognition, Alania-2 reaches a word error rate of 1.44%, compared with 5.99% for our previous system. On its built-in voices, it comes within half a point of character error rate of a 2.3B-parameter model at under a quarter of the size, and a 7.6M-parameter single-voice model trained with the same recipe matches the most intelligible systems we measured, which suggests that training data matters more for intelligibility than model size. We also report practical findings on voice cloning: conditioning on the reference audio alone, rather than continuing it, cuts skipped words from 21.9% to 1.7%; 20-30 seconds of reference audio works best; and a low-rank adapter trained in about two minutes raises speaker similarity well above instant cloning. Finally, we describe inference-engine changes that bring first audio down to 32 ms for a single stream. We release our evaluation harness and three Turkish speech and text datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13845
Client-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) across Indic and Classical scripts eliminates cloud transcription costs, network tail latency, and server-side audio retention, yet neural exports face four systems bottlenecks in browsers and mobile runtimes: (1) monolithic per-language Conformer checkpoints require ~177 MiB per script (> 2.1 GiB across 12 scripts), exhausting CacheStorage quotas; (2) static relative positional encoding tables embed 10.2-20.5 MB of FP32 constants while 1x1 Conv1d layers trigger slow or unsupported ConvInteger kernels in WebAssembly SIMD; (3) sliding-window CTC flickers on boundary tokens; and (4) mobile WebAudio pipelines suffer 44.1/48 kHz sample-rate mismatches and silent AudioWorklet stalls under iOS WKWebView. We present Swanada, an open-source 16 kHz streaming ASR system spanning Classical Sanskrit, Indian English, and ten Indian languages (sa, en, hi, kn, mr, bn, ta, te, ml, gu, pa, or) across browser WebAssembly, this http URL, and Python. Swanada pairs capability-routed shared INT8 Conformer encoders (a 17-layer 177.38 MiB Studio tier at $d = 512$ for desktop/servers and a distilled 14-layer 25.35 MiB Mobile tier at $d = 256$ for phones) with twelve hot-swappable 515.0 KiB native-script linear CTC heads ($257 \times 512$), cutting 12-language storage by $11.6\times$ (183.4 MiB) and $67.8\times$ (31.39 MiB; 25.85 MiB first load). Runtime protobuf tail surgery exposes the shared representation in $< 2$ ms, while dynamic positional synthesis, MatMul pointwise convolutions, and post-quantization QInt8 head calibration preserve sub-30 MB accuracy. Across $N = 480$ held-out and $N = 1,280$ open public test clips (FLEURS, LibriSpeech, GLOBE, AMI, wild Sanskrit), Swanada achieves 5.43% held-out and 8.87% 12-language open CER on Studio (18.56% and 19.23% on Mobile) at $0.0097\times$-$0.0264\times$ RTF, with 30.6 ms median TTFT and 0.00% committed-prefix churn.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13814
We present Walrus, a unified 8B speech-and-audio foundation model handling speech recognition (including code-switching and multi-talker speech), speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation, text-to-speech, emotion recognition, audio captioning, and general audio understanding. Our main contribution is not a new architecture but a data-centric training recipe; we use a standard decoder-only backbone initialized from Gemma 4, so that gains can be traced to the data. For speech generation, Walrus predicts low-bitrate discrete speech tokens, and a lightweight token-to-waveform decoder converts them into high-fidelity audio. The recipe is a three-stage data curriculum that moves from broad multilingual data to multi-talker, code-switching, and domain-specific data. At each stage, task-aware and dataset-aware weighting balances tasks with very different token budgets and protects core skills from forgetting. Trained on over 600M samples covering more than 20 tasks and 100 languages, Walrus leads on most multilingual, multi-talker, and code-switching ASR, speech translation, and audio understanding benchmarks, outperforming both open speech language models of comparable size and dedicated task-specific models. On most benchmarks, it even matches or surpasses the $4\times$ larger Qwen3-Omni's performance. Results suggest that data engineering is a primary driver of quality in multi-task speech and audio modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13689
Real-time disaster recognition from aerial imagery requires deep learning models that operate under strict memory, compute, and latency constraints. While recent approaches achieve high accuracy, their computational cost limits deployment on resource-constrained UAV platforms. This work introduces picoEmergencyNet, an ultra-lightweight convolutional neural network designed for aerial image disaster classification. The proposed architecture combines depthwise dilated convolutions with efficient channel attention and channel shuffling to enable multi-scale feature extraction at minimal computational cost. picoEmergencyNet has 23k parameters and 7M FLOPs, requiring only 0.1 MB of model storage. Evaluated on the AIDER and AIDERv2 disaster datasets, it achieves up to 96.1% accuracy, matching or exceeding state-of-the-art lightweight models that are orders of magnitude larger. Deployment experiments on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin show that, without hardware-specific optimizations, picoEmergencyNet achieves 258 FPS on GPU and 46 FPS on CPU with a 7x lower activation memory footprint compared to competing models. These results demonstrate that careful architectural specialization, rather than model scaling, enables highly efficient and accurate TinyML-ready disaster recognition for real-time UAV-based emergency monitoring.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13638
Nepali speakers regularly mix English words into conversation, but multilingual speech recognisers often struggle with language switches and the writing script used for English words. We study how to adapt SraVaani, a 449M-parameter hybrid TDT-CTC model, using a 172.8-hour corpus covering six Nepali speech domains. Its pretrained tokenizer does not support digits and several common symbols. Rather than replace it or discard these recordings, we generate Nepali and English readings for numbers and use zero-shot ASR output to select a plausible form. Full fine-tuning reduces test word error rate (WER) from 48.6% to 17.1%; a 12-epoch run reaches 16.3%, compared with 16.4% for fine-tuned Whisper large-v3-turbo. Freezing the encoder increases WER to 25.5%, while excluding numeric clips raises WER on numeric test speech from 14.3% to 21.3%. We also evaluate on FLEURS using both its original references and mixed-script alternatives. The comparison shows that transcription conventions explain part, but not all, of the out-of-domain performance loss.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13512
Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation (OV-SGG) requires models to recognize visual relationships beyond the training vocabulary, yet existing methods often rely on dataset-specific object--predicate co-occurrence patterns. Under long-tailed distributions and noisy object localization, such reliance leads to biased, entangled relation representations, limiting both rare-relation recognition and generalization to unseen predicates. To address these challenges, we propose RaRe, a reasoning-aware relational representation learning framework that transforms MLLM-generated chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales into structured relation embeddings. Rather than using CoT only as an intermediate reasoning trace for final prediction, RaRe directly optimizes the rationale-derived representation space to improve inter-relation discriminability. Specifically, RaRe first aligns rationale embeddings with textualized relation descriptions through self-supervised contrastive learning, and then refines rationale generation with a specificity-oriented reinforcement learning objective that encourages semantically object-pair-specific relational evidence. Experiments on VG150 and PSG demonstrate improved category-balanced recognition over existing baselines, while the additional gains from learning vary across datasets and proposal settings. Code available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13496
Integrating human feedback into language models has gained increasing attention as a means to align model outputs with human preferences, with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) serving as a prominent framework for preference-based alignment. Recent studies have incorporated eye-tracking (ET) data as an additional supervisory signal for reward model training, grounding reward learning in human reading behavior. Building on this approach, we extend prior fixation-centric models by leveraging established findings from cognitive psychology on human letter recognition. Specifically, we model visual attention as a spatially graded distribution centered on the current gaze location and incorporate this representation into reward model training. Our results show that the reward model trained with the proposed gaze distribution achieves higher preference prediction accuracy than a baseline model. Moreover, some results from our experiments are qualitatively consistent with established findings on human attention during reading, suggesting that they potentially capture cognitively meaningful aspects of human attention allocation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13477
Children's earliest years are a period of intense social learning, during which meaning is built through gaze, gesture, and physical contact. Yet, this critical aspect of social interaction remains under-evaluated in multimodal video understanding, as existing benchmarks prioritize the conversation-driven interactions of adults. We address this gap with \bench ($\textbf{N}$aturalistic $\textbf{E}$arly-childhood $\textbf{S}$ocial in$\textbf{T}$eractions), the first child-centric benchmark for nonverbal social reasoning. \bench comprises \totalvids manually annotated clips ($\sim$12s) curated for diversity across naturalistic settings, cultural contexts, and developmental stages. Beyond a lack of data, targeted model improvement in this domain is hindered by coarse evaluation schemas that conflate basic perception with higher-order reasoning. To resolve this, \bench introduces a compositional schema that builds atomic interaction cues into progressive levels of social reasoning: contextual, behavioral, interpersonal, and open-ended descriptions. Extensive analysis of state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) reveals a stark performance collapse: despite strong contextual recognition, models exhibit substantial gaps in decoding precise behavioral and interpersonal cues. We trace these failures to specific biases, including poor consequence grounding and temporal sensitivity. Finally, we ground \bench in real-world applications by evaluating VLMs using domain adaptation strategies. Ultimately, \bench provides a rigorous testbed for advancing socially grounded artificial intelligence in early childhood. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13213
Coding agents increasingly receive UI screenshots as part of bug reports, yet degraded image quality - caused by low resolution, compression artifacts, or small rendered text - can prevent them from identifying the relevant UI elements and source files. Vision-language models become less reliable as image quality deteriorates, while OCR-assisted approaches may propagate recognition errors from degraded inputs. Both approaches are limited when the visual evidence required for localization is no longer clearly observable in the query screenshot. We propose augmenting coding agents with repository-rendered reference images: crisp screenshots generated from the same codebase that the agent is tasked with modifying. These references provide readable visual evidence of the application's UI while preserving the current, potentially bug-containing implementation state. Because they are generated from the available repository rather than requiring a known bug-free version, they can be produced automatically for reproducible application states without manual image annotation. We evaluate the approach on a controlled benchmark derived from SWE-bench Multimodal by injecting visual UI bugs into a real web application. We vary screenshot degradation and reference-image provision and measure whether the coding agent identifies the correct source file. The results show that reference images improve file localization especially for degraded image quality, increasing the gold file match rate under fourfold downsampling with JPEG compression. We confirmed with further analysis that the proposed approach recognizes text approximately 12 percentage points better than language biased OCR under the same degradation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13026
Thai is written without spaces between words, making segmentation a foundational step in most Thai NLP pipelines. Existing tools primarily reproduce the word-level conventions of corpora such as BEST; however, because the notion of a "word" in Thai lacks a unified linguistic consensus, these conventions struggle with productive compounding, leading to arbitrary boundaries and ambiguity in downstream representations. Instead, we propose operating at the morphological level, focusing on khammoon, the smallest atomic unit that carries meaning. Segmenting at the morphemic level provides an explicit, consistent morphological representation that eliminates compounding ambiguity. Crucially, this representation benefits downstream learning: models trained on morphemes perform on par with or exceed word-level baselines across part-of-speech tagging, named-entity recognition, and sentiment classification, demonstrating that linguistic consistency improves representation quality without downstream performance penalty. To operationalize this representation, we translate linguistic principles into a formal decision guideline with near-perfect human agreement ($\kappa \approx 0.99$), scale annotation with an LLM, and correct systematic errors with human labels. Finally, we train khammoon, a lightweight 1M-parameter convolutional BiLSTM segmenter designed for efficient CPU inference, achieving a boundary F1 of 0.992 on out-of-domain text. The guideline, datasets, model, and library are all publicly released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13012
This paper proposes a novel, lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for edge device deployment. The CNN is developed to recognize and classify threats or targets of interest. The model is equipped with a real-time hotspot detection algorithm, which enables it to process information quickly and accurately, resulting in improved inference time of up to 20 fps and a detection range of more than 400 meters with typical thermal situational awareness sensors. The proposed CNN has been rigorously tested and validated to demonstrate its high accuracy, sensitivity, and low false positive rate, providing a reliable solution for edge devices to detect potential targets. Additionally, the lightweight design of the CNN allows for easy deployment, making it an ideal solution for extending the security bubble for edge devices. The proposed model can be used for a variety of applications, including surveillance, security, and object recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09756
Real-time Voice AI agents must separate the active user from intelligible background speech that survives conventional noise suppression. Background sources include television audio, family members, and colleagues. Production denoisers remove non-stationary environmental noise effectively. Background speech shares the spectral characteristics of the target and passes through, causing false acceptances in downstream speaker verification (SV) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). We benchmark open-source speaker embedders TitaNet-Large, TitaNet-Small, ECAPA-TDNN, CAM++, and SpeakerNet under a strict sub-second latency budget. Evaluation combines a controlled benchmark with a weighted human-annotated production set. Our controlled benchmark is built from real calls in which a second real speaker is injected into silence intervals at modulated amplitude. We report three findings. First, denoising before embedding is generally harmful and raises equal error rate (EER) across architectures. Second, truncating audio below the full voice-activity segment degrades every model. Third, roughly half of the TitaNet embedding is redundant for this task. Trailing dimensions encode population attributes such as language and gender. Such attributes carry little discriminative value in a demographically homogeneous user base. We distill these results into deployment guidance. Verification should run on raw audio with full voice-activity chunks. Thresholds should favor precision over F1. Truncated embeddings reduce the cost of similarity search.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09516
Large language models have expanded beyond text to vision, audio, and other modalities, but understanding raw electromagnetic (EM) signals remains challenging. Wideband recordings can contain millions of samples, whereas existing waveform-based EM models are primarily evaluated on short in-phase and quadrature (IQ) segments, leaving long-recording understanding and detailed description insufficiently explored. We introduce LEMMO, a large EM model for instruction-driven recognition and description of long raw IQ recordings. LEMMO combines a linear-attention EM encoder with anti-aliased temporal resampling to process up to eight million complex samples. Its EM-text interaction module conditions learnable queries on instructions before retrieving signal evidence. Compact queries support recognition, while structured queries with auxiliary factual supervision organize scene-level properties, signal attributes, and cross-signal relationships for detailed description. We also construct and release a unified 1.38-TB corpus of real-world and synthetic EM signals, including LEMMO-ShortQA and LEMMO-LongDesc. Compared with MERLIN-LoRA, LEMMO improves mean EM-Bench perception accuracy by 15.77 %, mean strategy-generation ROUGE-L F1 by 4.38 points, and mean LEMMO-ShortQA accuracy by 14.31 %. It also improves categorical and numerical fact F1 on both LEMMO-LongDesc tasks while preserving its language backbone's MMLU performance. Our code and datasets are available at this https URL and this https URL, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09476
Hand-object interactions (HOIs) can be captured by smartglasses to learn how people manipulate objects in daily life. Automatic logging of these interactions from an egocentric perspective provides time-stamped evidence of daily actions for applications like memory assistance. However, continuous RGB capture and wireless transmission exceed the energy and bandwidth budgets of smartglasses. We present EventHOI, an event-driven sensing and compression system that couples selective RGB capture with HOI-aware encoding to enable egocentric logging over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) while preserving downstream HOI logging performance. Our key insight is to use low-power event sensing both to determine when RGB capture is needed and to identify where visual detail must be preserved. A lightweight IMU-based egomotion cancellation pipeline suppresses egomotion-induced events so that residual HOI motion can guide RGB triggering and spatial compression. We build a smartglasses prototype and conduct an end-to-end evaluation of EventHOI on a 50-hour egocentric benchmark with 97 subjects and a 20-hour real-world dataset we collect from 10 participants, together covering a broad range of daily-life scenarios and environments. Compared to RGB-only baselines, EventHOI reduces always-on backend power consumption by 5.8-10.4x and uplink bandwidth by 2.9x, with minimal HOI recognition accuracy loss. The resulting RGB uplink of less than 130 kbps fits within commodity BLE bandwidth budgets, making stable BLE video streaming feasible for egocentric HOI logging. Demo video and project website: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09089
Named entity recognition (NER) is challenging for social media data in a low-resource language. LLMs often lag behind pretrained language models (PLMs) in NER performance, but they show promise in handling cases that PLMs struggle with. Using a dataset of Nepali tweets, we split the test set into "easy" and "hard" cases using token probabilities from a fine-tuned pretrained language model (PLM). We then evaluate an LLM on the hard test cases using 16 different prompt configurations. We find that selecting examples based on semantic similarity and increasing the number of examples improves F1 score by almost 10 points from the baseline configuration. Although the LLM underperforms the PLM on the full and easy test sets, it surpasses the PLM on the hard test set, resulting in an improved score when the two models are combined.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08967
Continuous music emotion recognition (MER) estimates how Arousal and Valence evolve within a song, yet the field's standard metric, pooled frame-level correlation, is dominated by between-song differences and cannot distinguish a model that tracks emotional dynamics from one that only ranks songs by their average level. We decompose annotation variance into between- and within-song components and show that mean squared error (MSE) targets the former, while windowed Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC = $r \cdot C_b$) targets the latter by penalising the variance compression MSE induces. A single weight $\lambda$ controls the trade-off: on 1,764 DEAM songs, raising $\lambda$ from 0 to 1 lowers pooled Arousal $r$ from 0.843 to 0.810 while raising mean within-song $r$ from 0.204 to 0.368. Building on this objective, we present MMAS (Multimodal Music Analysis System), an open-source model that predicts Arousal and Valence every 0.5 s from raw audio. It fuses frozen MERT-v1-95M embeddings with ten symbolic features from automatic transcription through a dual-branch temporal convolutional network with cross-modal attention. Because both branches are audio-derived, one model trains jointly on DEAM and PMEmo without domain conditioning. Under song-grouped 5-fold cross-validation (2,531 songs), pooled $r$ reaches 0.801/0.685 (Arousal/Valence) on DEAM and 0.742/0.746 on PMEmo. Against a ridge baseline on identical features, within-song Arousal $r$ roughly triples (0.344 vs. 0.125; $n = 353$ songs, Wilcoxon $p = 1.7 \times 10^{-21}$, $d = 0.56$). Complete transcription failure costs at most 0.04 pooled $r$. Split-conformal intervals attain 93.7% (Arousal) and 90.0% (Valence) marginal coverage at a 95% target, with the shortfall traced to within-song dependence. MMAS is released as a pip-installable package.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08966