E. Chng
Publications
VocalParse: Towards Unified and Scalable Singing Voice Transcription with Large Audio Language Models
High-quality singing annotations are fundamental to modern Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) systems. However, obtaining these annotations at scale through manual labeling is unrealistic due to the substantial labor and musical expertise required, making automatic annotation highly necessary. Despite their utility, current automatic transcription systems face significant challenges: they often rely on complex multi-stage pipelines, struggle to recover text-note alignments, and exhibit poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) singing data. To alleviate these issues, we present VocalParse, a unified singing voice transcription (SVT) model built upon a Large Audio Language Model (LALM). Specifically, our novel contribution is to introduce an interleaved prompting formulation that jointly models lyrics, melody, and word-note correspondence, yielding a generated sequence that directly maps to a structured musical score. Furthermore, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) style prompting strategy, which decodes lyrics first as a semantic scaffold, significantly mitigating the context disruption problem while preserving the structural benefits of interleaved generation. Experiments demonstrate that VocalParse achieves state-of-the-art SVT performance on multiple singing datasets. The source code and checkpoint are available at https://github.com/pymaster17/VocalParse.
Prosodic Boundary-Aware Streaming Generation for LLM-Based TTS with Streaming Text Input
Streaming TTS that receives streaming text is essential for interactive systems, yet this scheme faces two major challenges: unnatural prosody due to missing lookahead and long-form collapse due to unbounded context. We propose a prosodic-boundary-aware post-training strategy, adapting a pretrained LLM-based TTS model using weakly time-aligned data. Specifically, the model is adapted to learn early stopping at specified content boundaries when provided with limited future text. During inference, a sliding-window prompt carries forward previous text and speech tokens, ensuring bounded context and seamless concatenation. Evaluations show our method outperforms CosyVoice-Style interleaved baseline in both short and long-form scenarios. In long-text synthesis, especially, it achieves a 66.2% absolute reduction in word error rate (from 71.0% to 4.8%) and increases speaker and emotion similarity by 16.1% and 1.5% relatively, offering a robust solution for streaming TTS with incremental text.
Training-Free Intelligibility-Guided Observation Addition for Noisy ASR
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) degrades severely in noisy environments. Although speech enhancement (SE) front-ends effectively suppress background noise, they often introduce artifacts that harm recognition. Observation addition (OA) addressed this issue by fusing noisy and SE enhanced speech, improving recognition without modifying the parameters of the SE or ASR models. This paper proposes an intelligibility-guided OA method, where fusion weights are derived from intelligibility estimates obtained directly from the backend ASR. Unlike prior OA methods based on trained neural predictors, the proposed method is training-free, reducing complexity and enhances generalization. Extensive experiments across diverse SE-ASR combinations and datasets demonstrate strong robustness and improvements over existing OA baselines. Additional analyses of intelligibility-guided switching-based alternatives and frame versus utterance-level OA further validate the proposed design.
TextBFGS: Quasi-Newton Optimization for Discrete Executable Text via Gradient-Operator Retrieval
Optimizing discrete executable text such as prompts and code has recently been framed as a gradient-based process, effectively translating backpropagation concepts to the semantic space. However, existing methods predominantly operate as first-order optimizers akin to Stochastic Gradient Descent, which are suffering from slow convergence and instability because they neglect the semantic curvature of the optimization landscape. To bridge this gap, we introduce TextBFGS, a second-order framework to implement a Quasi-Newton optimization method for discrete text. Unlike traditional memory-based approaches that retrieve similar textual instances, TextBFGS approximates the inverse Hessian matrix by retrieving Gradient-Operators from the memory of pre-learned successful trajectories. Specifically, given a textual gradient feedback, TextBFGS identifies historical correction patterns from the optimization knowledge base and tries to apply these abstract operators to the current variable. This mechanism enables a One-Pass Update, combining feedback generation and second-order correction into a single inference step. Empirical evaluations on code optimization across diverse domains (e.g., HumanEval, MBPP) demonstrate that TextBFGS significantly outperforms first-order baselines. It achieves superior pass rates with fewer model calls and exhibits strong cross-task transferability, thus establishes a mathematically grounded paradigm for efficient, memory-aware text optimization.