Dehua Tao

h-index2
2papers
18citations

2 Papers

9.7SDMay 26
DSA-Tokenizer: Disentangled Semantic-Acoustic Tokenization via Flow Matching-based Hierarchical Fusion

Hanlin Zhang, Daxin Tan, Dehua Tao et al.

Speech tokenizers are a key building block of fully discrete Speech LLMs. Existing tokenizers either prioritize semantic encoding, fuse semantic content with acoustic style inseparably, or achieve incomplete semantic-acoustic disentanglement. To achieve better disentanglement, we propose \textbf{DSA-Tokenizer}, which explicitly disentangles speech into discrete semantic and acoustic tokens via distinct optimization constraints. Specifically, semantic tokens are supervised by ASR to capture linguistic content, while acoustic tokens focus on mel-spectrograms restoration to encode style. We further introduce a hierarchical Flow Matching decoder and a joint reconstruction-context inpainting training strategy, allowing the model to support both high-fidelity reconstruction and cross-utterance voice clone. To speed up inference, we distill the DiT decoder to reduce sampling steps of inference to 4 and improve synthesis quality with GAN fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that DSA-Tokenizer provides strong semantic-acoustic disentanglement, reliable controllable voice cloning, and efficient high-fidelity generation with low WER/CER. Moreover, our results suggest that disentangled tokenization provides a more effective interface for downstream large-model speech generation. Audio samples are avaialble at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/DSA_Tokenizer_demo/.

0.6CLJan 15
AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models

Xuan Luo, Lewei Yao, Libo Zhao et al.

While the automatic evaluation of omni-modal large models (OLMs) is essential, assessing empathy remains a significant challenge due to its inherent affectivity. To investigate this challenge, we introduce AEQ-Bench (Audio Empathy Quotient Benchmark), a novel benchmark to systematically assess two core empathetic capabilities of OLMs: (i) generating empathetic responses by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs (audio + text), and (ii) judging the empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription. Compared to existing benchmarks, AEQ-Bench incorporates two novel settings that vary in context specificity and speech tone. Comprehensive assessment across linguistic and paralinguistic metrics reveals that (1) OLMs trained with audio output capabilities generally outperformed models with text-only outputs, and (2) while OLMs align with human judgments for coarse-grained quality assessment, they remain unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness.