QualiSpeech: A Speech Quality Assessment Dataset with Natural Language Reasoning and Descriptions

This paper explores a novel perspective to speech quality assessment by leveraging natural language descriptions, offering richer, more nuanced insights than traditional numerical scoring methods. Natural language feedback provides instructive recommendations and detailed evaluations, yet existing datasets lack the comprehensive annotations needed for this approach. To bridge this gap, we introduce QualiSpeech, a comprehensive low-level speech quality assessment dataset encompassing 11 key aspects and detailed natural language comments that include reasoning and contextual insights. Additionally, we propose the QualiSpeech Benchmark to evaluate the low-level speech understanding capabilities of auditory large language models (LLMs). Experimental results demonstrate that finetuned auditory LLMs can reliably generate detailed descriptions of noise and distortion, effectively identifying their types and temporal characteristics. The results further highlight the potential for incorporating reasoning to enhance the accuracy and reliability of quality assessments. The dataset will be released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tsinghua-ee/QualiSpeech.

Good practices for evaluation of synthesized speech

This document is provided as a guideline for reviewers of papers about speech synthesis. We outline some best practices and common pitfalls for papers about speech synthesis, with a particular focus on evaluation. We also recommend that reviewers check the guidelines for authors written in the paper kit and consider those as reviewing criteria as well. This is intended to be a living document, and it will be updated as we receive comments and feedback from readers. We note that this document is meant to provide guidance only, and that reviewers should ultimately use their own discretion when evaluating papers.

ASVspoof 5: Design, Collection and Validation of Resources for Spoofing, Deepfake, and Adversarial Attack Detection Using Crowdsourced Speech

ASVspoof 5 is the fifth edition in a series of challenges which promote the study of speech spoofing and deepfake attacks as well as the design of detection solutions. We introduce the ASVspoof 5 database which is generated in crowdsourced fashion from data collected in diverse acoustic conditions (cf. studio-quality data for earlier ASVspoof databases) and from ~2,000 speakers (cf. ~100 earlier). The database contains attacks generated with 32 different algorithms, also crowdsourced, and optimised to varying degrees using new surrogate detection models. Among them are attacks generated with a mix of legacy and contemporary text-to-speech synthesis and voice conversion models, in addition to adversarial attacks which are incorporated for the first time. ASVspoof 5 protocols comprise seven speaker-disjoint partitions. They include two distinct partitions for the training of different sets of attack models, two more for the development and evaluation of surrogate detection models, and then three additional partitions which comprise the ASVspoof 5 training, development and evaluation sets. An auxiliary set of data collected from an additional 30k speakers can also be used to train speaker encoders for the implementation of attack algorithms. Also described herein is an experimental validation of the new ASVspoof 5 database using a set of automatic speaker verification and spoof/deepfake baseline detectors. With the exception of protocols and tools for the generation of spoofed/deepfake speech, the resources described in this paper, already used by participants of the ASVspoof 5 challenge in 2024, are now all freely available to the community.

Towards Automated Fact-Checking of Real-World Claims: Exploring Task Formulation and Assessment with LLMs

Fact-checking is necessary to address the increasing volume of misinformation. Traditional fact-checking relies on manual analysis to verify claims, but it is slow and resource-intensive. This study establishes baseline comparisons for Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) using Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple labeling schemes (binary, three-class, five-class) and extends traditional claim verification by incorporating analysis, verdict classification, and explanation in a structured setup to provide comprehensive justifications for real-world claims. We evaluate Llama-3 models of varying sizes (3B, 8B, 70B) on 17,856 claims collected from PolitiFact (2007-2024) using evidence retrieved via restricted web searches. We utilize TIGERScore as a reference-free evaluation metric to score the justifications. Our results show that larger LLMs consistently outperform smaller LLMs in classification accuracy and justification quality without fine-tuning. We find that smaller LLMs in a one-shot scenario provide comparable task performance to fine-tuned Small Language Models (SLMs) with large context sizes, while larger LLMs consistently surpass them. Evidence integration improves performance across all models, with larger LLMs benefiting most. Distinguishing between nuanced labels remains challenging, emphasizing the need for further exploration of labeling schemes and alignment with evidences. Our findings demonstrate the potential of retrieval-augmented AFC with LLMs.

Exploring Active Data Selection Strategies for Continuous Training in Deepfake Detection

In deepfake detection, it is essential to maintain high performance by adjusting the parameters of the detector as new deepfake methods emerge. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically and actively select the small amount of additional data required for the continuous training of deepfake detection models in situations where deepfake detection models are regularly updated. The proposed method automatically selects new training data from a \textit{redundant} pool set containing a large number of images generated by new deepfake methods and real images, using the confidence score of the deepfake detection model as a metric. Experimental results show that the deepfake detection model, continuously trained with a small amount of additional data automatically selected and added to the original training set, significantly and efficiently improved the detection performance, achieving an EER of 2.5% with only 15% of the amount of data in the pool set.

Towards An Integrated Approach for Expressive Piano Performance Synthesis from Music Scores

This paper presents an integrated system that transforms symbolic music scores into expressive piano performance audio. By combining a Transformer-based Expressive Performance Rendering (EPR) model with a fine-tuned neural MIDI synthesiser, our approach directly generates expressive audio performances from score inputs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system to offer a streamlined method for converting score MIDI files lacking expression control into rich, expressive piano performances. We conducted experiments using subsets of the ATEPP dataset, evaluating the system with both objective metrics and subjective listening tests. Our system not only accurately reconstructs human-like expressiveness, but also captures the acoustic ambience of environments such as concert halls and recording studios. Additionally, the proposed system demonstrates its ability to achieve musical expressiveness while ensuring good audio quality in its outputs.

Explaining Speaker and Spoof Embeddings via Probing

This study investigates the explainability of embedding representations, specifically those used in modern audio spoofing detection systems based on deep neural networks, known as spoof embeddings. Building on established work in speaker embedding explainability, we examine how well these spoof embeddings capture speaker-related information. We train simple neural classifiers using either speaker or spoof embeddings as input, with speaker-related attributes as target labels. These attributes are categorized into two groups: metadata-based traits (e.g., gender, age) and acoustic traits (e.g., fundamental frequency, speaking rate). Our experiments on the ASVspoof 2019 LA evaluation set demonstrate that spoof embeddings preserve several key traits, including gender, speaking rate, F0, and duration. Further analysis of gender and speaking rate indicates that the spoofing detector partially preserves these traits, potentially to ensure the decision process remains robust against them.

Libri2Vox Dataset: Target Speaker Extraction with Diverse Speaker Conditions and Synthetic Data

Target speaker extraction (TSE) is essential in speech processing applications, particularly in scenarios with complex acoustic environments. Current TSE systems face challenges in limited data diversity and a lack of robustness in real-world conditions, primarily because they are trained on artificially mixed datasets with limited speaker variability and unrealistic noise profiles. To address these challenges, we propose Libri2Vox, a new dataset that combines clean target speech from the LibriTTS dataset with interference speech from the noisy VoxCeleb2 dataset, providing a large and diverse set of speakers under realistic noisy conditions. We also augment Libri2Vox with synthetic speakers generated using state-of-the-art speech generative models to enhance speaker diversity. Additionally, to further improve the effectiveness of incorporating synthetic data, curriculum learning is implemented to progressively train TSE models with increasing levels of difficulty. Extensive experiments across multiple TSE architectures reveal varying degrees of improvement, with SpeakerBeam demonstrating the most substantial gains: a 1.39 dB improvement in signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) on the Libri2Talker test set compared to baseline training. Building upon these results, we further enhanced performance through our speaker similarity-based curriculum learning approach with the Conformer architecture, achieving an additional 0.78 dB improvement over conventional random sampling methods in which data samples are randomly selected from the entire dataset. These results demonstrate the complementary benefits of diverse real-world data, synthetic speaker augmentation, and structured training strategies in building robust TSE systems.

It Takes Two: Real-time Co-Speech Two-person's Interaction Generation via Reactive Auto-regressive Diffusion Model

Conversational scenarios are very common in real-world settings, yet existing co-speech motion synthesis approaches often fall short in these contexts, where one person's audio and gestures will influence the other's responses. Additionally, most existing methods rely on offline sequence-to-sequence frameworks, which are unsuitable for online applications. In this work, we introduce an audio-driven, auto-regressive system designed to synthesize dynamic movements for two characters during a conversation. At the core of our approach is a diffusion-based full-body motion synthesis model, which is conditioned on the past states of both characters, speech audio, and a task-oriented motion trajectory input, allowing for flexible spatial control. To enhance the model's ability to learn diverse interactions, we have enriched existing two-person conversational motion datasets with more dynamic and interactive motions. We evaluate our system through multiple experiments to show it outperforms across a variety of tasks, including single and two-person co-speech motion generation, as well as interactive motion generation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system capable of generating interactive full-body motions for two characters from speech in an online manner.

The First VoicePrivacy Attacker Challenge Evaluation Plan

The First VoicePrivacy Attacker Challenge is a new kind of challenge organized as part of the VoicePrivacy initiative and supported by ICASSP 2025 as the SP Grand Challenge It focuses on developing attacker systems against voice anonymization, which will be evaluated against a set of anonymization systems submitted to the VoicePrivacy 2024 Challenge. Training, development, and evaluation datasets are provided along with a baseline attacker system. Participants shall develop their attacker systems in the form of automatic speaker verification systems and submit their scores on the development and evaluation data to the organizers. To do so, they can use any additional training data and models, provided that they are openly available and declared before the specified deadline. The metric for evaluation is equal error rate (EER). Results will be presented at the ICASSP 2025 special session to which 5 selected top-ranked participants will be invited to submit and present their challenge systems.