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
We introduce DyShip, a framework for classifying speaker familiarity and kinship from dyadic conversations in the Seamless Interaction corpus. We compare five speech representations: spectrograms, MFCCs, self-supervised WavLM representations, x-vectors, and estimated articulatory movements. Spectral features perform best for familiarity classification, reaching an accuracy of 87.81%, while WavLM achieves the highest kinship accuracy of 85.17%. X-vectors and articulatory features yield weaker results on familiarity classifiaction, but shine for kinship classification, with an AUC of 0.909 for x-vectors. Most classifiers exceed previously reported human and audio language model scores on the same dataset. These findings highlight the potential of conventional acoustic features for relationship inference and motivate further investigation of the conversational cues captured by different representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14241
Misogyny is among the most prevalent forms of online hate speech directed at Brazilian users, yet open and auditable resources dedicated to it in Brazilian Portuguese remain scarce. We introduce MISO-BR, an open, documented and versioned corpus of 896 balanced social media texts annotated for binary misogyny, released with its construction protocol and reproducible baselines. The corpus combines lexicon- and target-guided scraping from X with items imported from OLID-BR, a large language model triage stage whose prompt and decoding parameters are released, and manual annotation by three annotators following a written guide. Inter-annotator reliability reaches a Fleiss' kappa of 0.788 over 816 items. Under a single fixed protocol we compare four classical classifiers (Multinomial and Bernoulli Naive Bayes, a linear SVM and a random forest) with fine-tuned BERTimbau Base and Large. The classical models cluster between 0.651 and 0.676 macro-F1 and are precision-oriented but recall-poor. The transformers reach 0.833 macro-F1 and accuracy (Wilson 95% CI for accuracy [0.77, 0.88]), a gap of roughly 16 points, while Base and Large are indistinguishable on the test set despite a 2.6x difference in training cost. We argue that the value of the resource lies less in its headline scores than in the auditability of its pipeline, and we state three limits that users must reckon with: the artificial class balance, whose effect on precision under realistic prevalence we quantify; the association between provenance and label, which the released source field makes measurable; and the selection bias induced by lexicon-guided sampling and automatic triage. The corpus, annotation guide, models and experimental scripts are publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14036
Which linguistic units minimise the bitrate required to encode speech content: phones, syllables, words, maybe larger units, or something in between? This question has implications for the development of speech and language systems and theories of human language processing. Using a transcribed corpus of 960 hours of English audiobooks, I compare the information rates of phones, syllables, words, multi-word combinations and intermediate tokenisations. While all units are equivalent under a perfect language model, it makes sense to compare these under limited modelling budgets; I use $n$-gram and transformer language models. The lowest bitrates are achieved using words, with slightly longer units sometimes performing best. The results show that, when modelling capacity is limited, units larger than syllables but smaller than long multi-word phrases provide the most efficient representation in terms of information rate.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13990
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
Antalia-2 Mini is a single-voice Turkish text-to-speech model with 7,620,931 parameters. It reads characters and produces 48 kHz audio at 41 times real time on an Apple M5 laptop CPU (2 threads). Its training audio came only from VoxCPM2 (the teacher), about 300 times larger, cloning one synthetic clip; automatic checks kept about 1,790 h. Fine-tuning the vocoder on the acoustic model's own mel spectrograms cut the word error rate (WER) of Whisper's transcripts from a mean of 3.89% to 1.75% at adjacent pre-release checkpoints. The teacher corrupts the start of a clip when the first word begins with ö, the student learned this, and a spoken prefix we cut from the output hides it. On the 495-sentence Freya-TR-Eval benchmark, where we tuned settings, version 1.0.1 has WER 1.09% and character error rate 0.22% on our public harness. A paired bootstrap cannot distinguish these from EMA Lightning, an 8.6M Turkish model, which scores higher on full-band UTMOS, an English-trained quality proxy. No human listening test exists. Weights, inference code and the benchmark harness are public under Apache-2.0; training code and data are not.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13811
End-to-end VITS text-to-speech models synthesize natural speech in a single forward pass, yet standard ONNX exports execute monolithically over an entire clause, delaying Time-To-First-Audio (TTFA) to several seconds and spiking activation memory. Client-side deployment across Indic scripts faces four further bottlenecks: 138.8 MB float32 checkpoints per language strain browser caches, mobile WebGPU stalls for 6-14 s compiling convolution shaders while still running slower than real time ($1.44\times$ RTF), small WebAssembly pthread pools stall at barriers on big-LITTLE mobile CPUs, and mobile Web Audio pipelines drop frames or mute output under AudioWorklet contention and iOS WKWebView rules. We present Ninada, an open-source 24 kHz TTS system covering English, Classical Sanskrit, and ten Indian languages (sa, en, hi, kn, mr, bn, ta, te, ml, gu, pa, or) across a capability-routed 48-checkpoint fleet: 24 studio HiFi-GAN v1 specialists (27.9 MB W8A32+FP16 ONNX) for desktop/WebGPU and 24 distilled c8c8_384 iSTFTNet specialists (21.7 MB ONNX, $2.64\times$ fewer vocoder MACs via an exact NOLA dual-window ConvTranspose1d inverse STFT with zero complex ops) for mobile WASM, plus a 0.0 MB zero-dependency Klatt fallback. At runtime, Ninada splits a single ONNX file in memory in $< 15$ ms into prior, flow, and windowed vocoder sub-sessions streaming 12-frame halos with raised-cosine crossfades. On $N = 480$ held-out 24 kHz studio utterances, Ninada achieves 3.22 dB 0-8 kHz MCD (3.09 dB mobile iSTFTNet; 1.33 dB 24-voice distillation MCD, vs. 5.17 dB for the 1,526.8 MB 16 kHz Meta MMS fleet) and 6.07 dB 8-12 kHz error, delivering 89-155 ms audible startup on desktop WebGPU and 538-649 ms zero-underrun streaming at 0.75-0.76x RTF on a physical Google Pixel 10 Pro XL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10035
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
Attributing early Chinese Buddhist translations requires evidence that scholars can trace back to the texts. We develop an interpretable stylometric framework that uses features defined or reviewed by Buddhist philologists, including function characters, sentence formulas, sentence-final characters, sentence length, and part-of-speech n-grams. We construct stylistic profiles from 31 authenticated translations by seven translators from the Eastern Han through the Western Jin, then compare eight disputed texts with An Shigao's profile. Two texts, T1557 and T0101, show the strongest stylistic similarity to the authenticated An Shigao corpus, with scores of 0.783 and 0.687, respectively. The attributions agree with those reported by a published BERT-based approach on the same set of disputed texts. The framework requires no task-specific training and allows scholars to inspect which linguistic features support each proposed attribution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13636
3D human motion generation plays a crucial role in game development, extended reality (XR), digital humans, and embodied simulation. Beyond motion generation, practical pipelines include rigging, retargeting, and rendering, making ultra-fast long-term 3D motion generation without compromising quality valuable for real-time interactive applications. Despite promising progress, high-quality long-horizon motion generation under tight inference budgets remains challenging, owing to 2 coupled bottlenecks: (1) generative strategies that require many sampling steps for high-quality 3D motion generation and (2) model architectures with substantial per-step computational and memory costs for long sequences. We present FlashMotion, a co-designed framework for high-quality long-horizon 3D motion generation under a strict inference budget, covering text-to-motion, music-to-dance, and speech-to-gesture tasks. To enhance trajectory-level efficiency, we introduce a 3D motion-space MeanFlow formulation with kinematic and dynamic consistency constraints for few-step generation, together with an Adaptive Soft masking mechanism for temporally coherent motion editing. To improve per-step efficiency, we design a lightweight non-autoregressive BiMamba architecture with condition-guided state selection and AdaIN-based condition fusion mechanism, enhancing cross-modal alignment and generalization to longer motion sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlashMotion achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in both quality and efficiency across text-to-motion, speech-to-gesture, and music-to-dance generation. Code is available at FlashMotion (this https URL).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13626
Generating long-form speech requires models to keep content, speaker identity, turn-taking, and expressive style consistent over time. Yet most open training corpora contain examples lasting only tens of seconds and open long-form benchmarks cover at most two speakers per recording. We introduce Emilia2, a 229K-hour multilingual dataset for controllable long-form speech generation. From in-the-wild data, Emilia2 constructs short utterances, single-speaker long-form speech, and multi-speaker dialogues, preserving transcripts, speaker identities, pauses, and acoustic transitions. Examples longer than five minutes account for 50.0% of single-speaker long-form hours and 66.8% of dialogue hours. To support expressive control, Emilia2 provides natural language instructions for 4.77M examples and nonverbal-vocalization tags for 933K examples. We also introduce Emilia2-testset, 23 hours of bilingual recordings of up to 30 minutes and four speakers, each speaker paired with reference audio. We train autoregressive (AR) and non-autoregressive (NAR) models on Emilia2. Our 0.6B-backbone NAR model achieves the lowest Chinese CER and English WER on TTSD-Eval (5.27%/9.93%) among compared systems, while our AR model is on par with Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-VD on InstructTTSEval (zh/en: 76.2/78.3 vs. 77.1/77.9). These results validate Emilia2 as a comprehensive data foundation for long-form speech generation and minute-scale expressive control. Demo: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13614
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
Co-speech gestures can increase engagement and improve speech understanding. Yet, most data-driven robot systems generate either rhythmic beat-like motion or semantically meaningful iconic gestures, but not both. We present an emotion-aware rhythmic-semantic co-speech gesture system that generates iconic and beat behaviors in real time from text and the robot's internal emotional state. We formalize the task of beat-iconic gesture generation using emotion and propose lightweight models that predict iconic timing and intensity, then fill the remaining spans with emotion-conditioned beats at an appropriate intensity level. We train on the BEAT2 dataset and deploy the system on the social robot Haru. In an online user study with 60 participants, our method shows stronger speech-gesture alignment and is preferred over baseline methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13472
Spoken Language Diarization (SLD) models provide frame-level language information of a speech recording. SLD modeling pipeline includes feature extraction from pre-trained speech models followed by clustering. Fine-tuning pre-trained speech models has shown performance gains for SLD with its magnitude being dataset dependent. Off-target Posterior Mass (OTPM), computed based on posterior language identification probabilities is proposed as a diagnostic metric to forecast performance gains from SLD fine-tuning. OTPM obtains positive correlation with probe gains, 0.56 on unseen synthetic bilingual data and 0.23 on real-world corpora. These results indicate promising potential of OTPM as a diagnostic metric for SLD.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13430
In social science research, text annotation is a fundamental task that is traditionally a costly, hard-to-scale manual process. Researchers have used large language models (LLMs) to perform annotation by writing a definition of a concept into a prompt - a rule that determines whether a label should be attributed to a text depending on its content. However, concepts such as hate speech, fake news, and terrorism typically have several theoretically defensible competing definitions. It is also unknown whether the model actually applied the definition to provide the label or the label was based on the model's pretrained notion of the concept. To test this, we have the model annotate the same texts twice, each time with a different definition. We call the disagreement between the two sets of annotations definition sensitivity. As a control, we paraphrase one definition but leave its requirements unchanged - the disagreement between the annotations with the two wordings becomes the paraphrase floor. Across six concepts and three LLMs, a swap of competing definitions always changes more annotations, on average, than a paraphrase. This shows that the annotations depend on the prompted definition, so any set of annotations should be interpreted together with the definition that produced it. The LLM annotator's definition sensitivity and its paraphrase floor should both be reported in such work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13339
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
Generative pipelines can now turn every product page of an e-commerce catalog into a short video ad, but deciding whether such an ad is usable is not one good-or-bad call. We describe how we operationalized the review and editing of these ads so that both can keep pace with generation: reviewers go through each ad scene by scene and answer six questions, on the product, scene quality, pronunciation, script, sound and captions; judges built from vision-language, speech and language models file each finding under the matching question, and reviewers accept or reject each finding and add what the judges missed. Each confirmed issue then opens an edit tool matched to it. The questions and the routing from a finding to its fix do not depend on the models that generate the ad. Across 120 ads from our pipeline, reviewed with judge findings on screen, reviewers marked the product wrong on 60% of scenes, and script, caption or sound problems on under 10% each. On 60 of these ads, they marked the product wrong on 58% of scenes, far more than the 26% marked by two reviewers who later saw the ads with the judges hidden; one reviewer who saw the ads both ways marked 57% with judge findings and 19% without. On 120 blind-labeled scenes, a product judge that watches the clip with the catalog photos reached AUC 0.84, while video-quality and photo-similarity scores were close to chance. We tune the judges for recall: the product judge catches nearly all defects but also flags many clean scenes, so reviewers decide; together, the judges widen what reviewers mark and reviewers add what the judges miss. Without judge findings, one reviewer's marking faded over a session. We release a review-portal template and our review data (120 ads and 562 scenes with judge findings and human marks, plus 120 blind-labeled scenes with baseline scores) at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13178
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
Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong potential for social media content moderation, but their trustworthiness beyond overall accuracy remains underexplored. We introduce TrustMod-SM, a benchmark of roughly 29,000 instances across eight datasets, to evaluate LLM moderators on five dimensions: trustfulness, fairness, safety, robustness, and context integrity. Evaluating 16 open-weight models (0.5B-284B parameters, spanning text-only and vision-language architectures) and one closed frontier model, we find persistent trustworthiness gaps. Higher detection accuracy often coincides with greater demographic disparity, and models frequently comply with concealment or exaggeration prompts, assign high confidence to wrong predictions, rarely escalate ambiguous cases, and struggle to separate hate speech from counter-speech or reclaimed language (especially below 8B parameters). Scaling does not uniformly resolve these issues, and no single model excels across all five dimensions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12970