Dong Zhang

Jun Zhan, Mingyang Han, Yuxuan Xie et al.

Spoken language models (SLMs) have emerged as a unified paradigm for speech understanding and generation, enabling natural human machine interaction. However, while most progress has focused on semantic accuracy and instruction following, the ability of SLMs to adapt their speaking style based on spoken instructions has received limited attention. We introduce Voice Style Adaptation (VSA), a new task that examines whether SLMs can modify their speaking style, such as timbre, prosody, or persona following natural language spoken commands. To study this task, we present VStyle, a bilingual (Chinese & English) benchmark covering four categories of speech generation: acoustic attributes, natural language instruction, role play, and implicit empathy. We also introduce the Large Audio Language Model as a Judge (LALM as a Judge) framework, which progressively evaluates outputs along textual faithfulness, style adherence, and naturalness, ensuring reproducible and objective assessment. Experiments on commercial systems and open source SLMs demonstrate that current models face clear limitations in controllable style adaptation, highlighting both the novelty and challenge of this task. By releasing VStyle and its evaluation toolkit, we aim to provide the community with a foundation for advancing human centered spoken interaction. The dataset and code are publicly available at \href{https://junzhan2000.github.io/VStyle.github.io/}{project's homepage}.

Xingzu Liu, Songhang deng, Mingbang Wang et al.

Large language models have made significant advancements in various natural language processing tasks, including coreference resolution. However, traditional methods often fall short in effectively distinguishing referential relationships due to a lack of integration between syntactic and semantic information. This study introduces an innovative framework aimed at enhancing coreference resolution by utilizing pretrained language models. Our approach combines syntax parsing with semantic role labeling to accurately capture finer distinctions in referential relationships. By employing state-of-the-art pretrained models to gather contextual embeddings and applying an attention mechanism for fine-tuning, we improve the performance of coreference tasks. Experimental results across diverse datasets show that our method surpasses conventional coreference resolution systems, achieving notable accuracy in disambiguating references. This development not only improves coreference resolution outcomes but also positively impacts other natural language processing tasks that depend on precise referential understanding.