Francesco Verdini

Francesco Verdini, Pierfrancesco Melucci, Stefano Perna et al.

The remarkable performance achieved by Large Language Models (LLM) has driven research efforts to leverage them for a wide range of tasks and input modalities. In speech-to-text (S2T) tasks, the emerging solution consists of projecting the output of the encoder of a Speech Foundational Model (SFM) into the LLM embedding space through an adapter module. However, no work has yet investigated how much the downstream-task performance depends on each component (SFM, adapter, LLM) nor whether the best design of the adapter depends on the chosen SFM and LLM. To fill this gap, we evaluate the combination of 5 adapter modules, 2 LLMs (Mistral and Llama), and 2 SFMs (Whisper and SeamlessM4T) on two widespread S2T tasks, namely Automatic Speech Recognition and Speech Translation. Our results demonstrate that the SFM plays a pivotal role in downstream performance, while the adapter choice has moderate impact and depends on the SFM and LLM.

Antonis Asonitis, Francesco Verdini, Aref Farhadipour et al.

We present GRAFT, a per-word pronunciation conditioning mechanism for text-to-speech neural codec language modeling. Existing systems reach high intelligibility and naturalness but inherit the ambiguity of text and mispronounce rare proper nouns, loanwords and technical terms. Even phoneme-conditioned models offer no direct acoustic handle for per-word pronunciation. GRAFT controls the pronunciation of a chosen word from a short spoken sample of it, encoded with the model's own speech tokenizer and bound to the word's position in the prompt. Voice conversion during training-data construction disentangles the hint speaker from the target speaker, so the hint may come from any voice while the output stays in the target voice. In a blind English listening study, human raters rank GRAFT first by a clear margin, judging its rendering of the difficult word closest to a reference recording of that word. On a five-language objective benchmark, GRAFT reduces target-word phoneme error rate by 22-39% over the identical text-only backbone and outperforms competitive open-source zero-shot systems, both phoneme- and text-conditioned, on target-word pronunciation, while preserving speaker similarity and naturalness.

Artem Ploujnikov, Francesco Verdini, Samir Sadok et al.

Discrete audio representations have become increasingly popular for building multimodal text-audio systems and integrating audio capabilities into Large Language Models (LLMs). However, numerous studies report performance degradation on various downstream tasks due to information loss during discretization. To address this, we propose a novel approach combining temporally compressed discrete tokens with dimensionality-reduced continuous residuals. Our framework consists of a hybridized discrete-continuous focal modulation codec and a hybrid Transformer. This architecture performs autoregressive inference in the discrete domain, coupled with non-autoregressive prediction and continuous residual upsampling. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the retention of speaker characteristics compared to discrete-only methods, while simultaneously reducing the number of required autoregressive steps.