J. Dang
Famous AuthorPublications
EmoS: A Theory-Grounded Framework for Evaluating and Aligning Emotional Intelligence in Spoken Language Models
Despite significant advances in instruction-following and auditory comprehension, the evaluation of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains confined to rudimentary paralinguistic perception, lacking a systematic, theory-driven cognitive framework. We introduce EmoSBench, the first comprehensive EI evaluation benchmark for SLMs constructed upon the four-branch theoretical model, covering Perceiving, Understanding, Using, and Managing Emotion across ten sub-tasks. Preliminary assessments on EmoSBench reveal a substantial gap: even leading proprietary models like GPT-4o-Audio achieve only 52.6%, significantly trailing human baselines. To bridge this gap, we develop EmoS, a specialized evaluator model optimized via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). To facilitate its effective training, we curate EmoDialogue, a bilingual dataset providing necessary fine-grained supervision through response pairs with rigorously defined EI gradations. Concurrently, we introduce a reward mechanism integrating a Steep Exponential Accuracy Reward (SEAR) and a Rationale Fidelity Reward (RFR) to enforce precise ordinal scoring and valid reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that EmoS reaches 83.8% accuracy, approaching human-level performance. Furthermore, evaluations on authentic, unconstrained spoken interactions validate its robust real-world generalization, establishing a foundational framework for advancing emotionally intelligent dialogue systems.
Gated Multi-Graph Fusion via Graph Attention Networks for Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Spontaneous speech is a vital non-invasive biomarker for Alzheimer's Disease (AD), yet many systems overlook non-linear structural disruptions and clinical heterogeneity in pathological language. We propose a Multi-View Gated Graph Attention Network that transcribes audio via Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to construct semantic, dependency, and co-occurrence graphs, characterizing speech through a "content-structure-flow" framework. Notably, the co-occurrence graph leverages Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) from a normative corpus to quantify narrative logic and linguistic deviation. To address symptomatic diversity, an adaptive gated fusion mechanism dynamically integrates these views. Evaluated on the ADReSSo dataset, our model achieves 90.00% accuracy. Ablation results confirm that the PMI-based graph and heterogeneity-aware gating are essential for robust classification across diverse clinical populations. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/opeacc/AD.
Speech Meets ELF: Audio Conditional Continuous-Target Diffusion for Speech Recognition and Translation
Speech-to-text (S2T) systems for recognition (ASR) and translation (S2TT) typically generate discrete text tokens. In contrast, continuous-target language modelling performs generation in a continuous space, yet its potential for S2T remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose ELF-S2T, an audio-conditioned continuous-target generative model for S2T. Built upon the pre-trained Embedded Language Flows (ELF) backbone, ELF-S2T processes speech via a frozen Whisper encoder and a single linear projector, prepending the resulting audio condition to the noisy text latent for in-context, flow-matching denoising. To prevent the model from over-relying on its pre-trained text context, we introduce audio forcing during training, and further amplify the audio condition via classifier-free guidance at inference. Experiments on LibriSpeech and CoVoST2 show that ELF-S2T achieves competitive ASR and S2TT performance. Crucially, our error analysis reveals that, although ASR and S2TT errors look very different on the surface, both stem from the same underlying cause, a close distance confusion in the continuous latent space. This finding naturally aligns with the continuous representation generation paradigm, indicating a common semantic mapping process beneath recognition and translation. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Sslnon/ELF-S2T.
MSR-HuBERT: Self-supervised Pre-training for Adaptation to Multiple Sampling Rates
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has advanced speech processing. However, existing speech SSL methods typically assume a single sampling rate and struggle with mixed-rate data due to temporal resolution mismatch. To address this limitation, we propose MSRHuBERT, a multi-sampling-rate adaptive pre-training method. Building on HuBERT, we replace its single-rate downsampling CNN with a multi-sampling-rate adaptive downsampling CNN that maps raw waveforms from different sampling rates to a shared temporal resolution without resampling. This design enables unified mixed-rate pre-training and fine-tuning. In experiments spanning 16 to 48 kHz, MSRHuBERT outperforms HuBERT on speech recognition and full-band speech reconstruction, preserving high-frequency detail while modeling low-frequency semantic structure. Moreover, MSRHuBERT retains HuBERT's mask-prediction objective and Transformer encoder, so existing analyses and improvements that were developed for HuBERT can apply directly.
Breaking Data Efficiency Dilemma: A Federated and Augmented Learning Framework For Alzheimer's Disease Detection via Speech
Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is crucial for delaying its progression. While AI-based speech detection is non-invasive and cost-effective, it faces a critical data efficiency dilemma due to medical data scarcity and privacy barriers. Therefore, we propose FAL-AD, a novel framework that synergistically integrates federated learning with data augmentation to systematically optimize data efficiency. Our approach delivers three key breakthroughs: First, absolute efficiency improvement through voice conversion-based augmentation, which generates diverse pathological speech samples via cross-category voice-content recombination. Second, collaborative efficiency breakthrough via an adaptive federated learning paradigm, maximizing cross-institutional benefits under privacy constraints. Finally, representational efficiency optimization by an attentive cross-modal fusion model, which achieves fine-grained word-level alignment and acoustic-textual interaction. Evaluated on ADReSSo, FAL-AD achieves a state-of-the-art multi-modal accuracy of 91.52%, outperforming all centralized baselines and demonstrating a practical solution to the data efficiency dilemma. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/smileix/fal-ad.