Convergent and divergent connectivity patterns of the arcuate fasciculus in macaques and humans

The organization and connectivity of the arcuate fasciculus (AF) in nonhuman primates remain contentious, especially concerning how its anatomy diverges from that of humans. Here, we combined cross-scale single-neuron tracing - using viral-based genetic labeling and fluorescence micro-optical sectioning tomography in macaques (n = 4; age 3 - 11 years) - with whole-brain tractography from 11.7T diffusion MRI. Complemented by spectral embedding analysis of 7.0T MRI in humans, we performed a comparative connectomic analysis of the AF across species. We demonstrate that the macaque AF originates in the temporal-parietal cortex, traverses the auditory cortex and parietal operculum, and projects into prefrontal regions. In contrast, the human AF exhibits greater expansion into the middle temporal gyrus and stronger prefrontal and parietal operculum connectivity - divergences quantified by Kullback-Leibler analysis that likely underpin the evolutionary specialization of human language networks. These interspecies differences - particularly the human AF's broader temporal integration and strengthened frontoparietal linkages - suggest a connectivity-based substrate for the emergence of advanced language processing unique to humans. Furthermore, our findings offer a neuroanatomical framework for understanding AF-related disorders such as aphasia and dyslexia, where aberrant connectivity disrupts language function.

Towards Robust Overlapping Speech Detection: A Speaker-Aware Progressive Approach Using WavLM

Overlapping Speech Detection (OSD) aims to identify regions where multiple speakers overlap in a conversation, a critical challenge in multi-party speech processing. This work proposes a speaker-aware progressive OSD model that leverages a progressive training strategy to enhance the correlation between subtasks such as voice activity detection (VAD) and overlap detection. To improve acoustic representation, we explore the effectiveness of state-of-the-art self-supervised learning (SSL) models, including WavLM and wav2vec 2.0, while incorporating a speaker attention module to enrich features with frame-level speaker information. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an F1 score of 82.76\% on the AMI test set, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness in OSD.

AISHELL-5: The First Open-Source In-Car Multi-Channel Multi-Speaker Speech Dataset for Automatic Speech Diarization and Recognition

This paper delineates AISHELL-5, the first open-source in-car multi-channel multi-speaker Mandarin automatic speech recognition (ASR) dataset. AISHLL-5 includes two parts: (1) over 100 hours of multi-channel speech data recorded in an electric vehicle across more than 60 real driving scenarios. This audio data consists of four far-field speech signals captured by microphones located on each car door, as well as near-field signals obtained from high-fidelity headset microphones worn by each speaker. (2) a collection of 40 hours of real-world environmental noise recordings, which supports the in-car speech data simulation. Moreover, we also provide an open-access, reproducible baseline system based on this dataset. This system features a speech frontend model that employs speech source separation to extract each speaker's clean speech from the far-field signals, along with a speech recognition module that accurately transcribes the content of each individual speaker. Experimental results demonstrate the challenges faced by various mainstream ASR models when evaluated on the AISHELL-5. We firmly believe the AISHELL-5 dataset will significantly advance the research on ASR systems under complex driving scenarios by establishing the first publicly available in-car ASR benchmark.

Weakly Supervised Data Refinement and Flexible Sequence Compression for Efficient Thai LLM-based ASR

Despite remarkable achievements, automatic speech recognition (ASR) in low-resource scenarios still faces two challenges: high-quality data scarcity and high computational demands. This paper proposes EThai-ASR, the first to apply large language models (LLMs) to Thai ASR and create an efficient LLM-based ASR system. EThai-ASR comprises a speech encoder, a connection module and a Thai LLM decoder. To address the data scarcity and obtain a powerful speech encoder, EThai-ASR introduces a self-evolving data refinement strategy to refine weak labels, yielding an enhanced speech encoder. Moreover, we propose a pluggable sequence compression module used in the connection module with three modes designed to reduce the sequence length, thus decreasing computational demands while maintaining decent performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EThai-ASR has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in multiple datasets. We release our refined text transcripts to promote further research.

Delayed-KD: Delayed Knowledge Distillation based CTC for Low-Latency Streaming ASR

CTC-based streaming ASR has gained significant attention in real-world applications but faces two main challenges: accuracy degradation in small chunks and token emission latency. To mitigate these challenges, we propose Delayed-KD, which applies delayed knowledge distillation on CTC posterior probabilities from a non-streaming to a streaming model. Specifically, with a tiny chunk size, we introduce a Temporal Alignment Buffer (TAB) that defines a relative delay range compared to the non-streaming teacher model to align CTC outputs and mitigate non-blank token mismatches. Additionally, TAB enables fine-grained control over token emission delay. Experiments on 178-hour AISHELL-1 and 10,000-hour WenetSpeech Mandarin datasets show consistent superiority of Delayed-KD. Impressively, Delayed-KD at 40 ms latency achieves a lower character error rate (CER) of 5.42% on AISHELL-1, comparable to the competitive U2++ model running at 320 ms latency.

Multi-Mode Process Control Using Multi-Task Inverse Reinforcement Learning

In the era of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing, process systems engineering must adapt to digital transformation. While reinforcement learning offers a model-free approach to process control, its applications are limited by the dependence on accurate digital twins and well-designed reward functions. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel framework that integrates inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with multi-task learning for data-driven, multi-mode control design. Using historical closed-loop data as expert demonstrations, IRL extracts optimal reward functions and control policies. A latent-context variable is incorporated to distinguish modes, enabling the training of mode-specific controllers. Case studies on a continuous stirred tank reactor and a fed-batch bioreactor validate the effectiveness of this framework in handling multi-mode data and training adaptable controllers.

Cross-Sequence Semi-Supervised Learning for Multi-Parametric MRI-Based Visual Pathway Delineation

Accurately delineating the visual pathway (VP) is crucial for understanding the human visual system and diagnosing related disorders. Exploring multi-parametric MR imaging data has been identified as an important way to delineate VP. However, due to the complex cross-sequence relationships, existing methods cannot effectively model the complementary information from different MRI sequences. In addition, these existing methods heavily rely on large training data with labels, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming to obtain. In this work, we propose a novel semi-supervised multi-parametric feature decomposition framework for VP delineation. Specifically, a correlation-constrained feature decomposition (CFD) is designed to handle the complex cross-sequence relationships by capturing the unique characteristics of each MRI sequence and easing the multi-parametric information fusion process. Furthermore, a consistency-based sample enhancement (CSE) module is developed to address the limited labeled data issue, by generating and promoting meaningful edge information from unlabeled data. We validate our framework using two public datasets, and one in-house Multi-Shell Diffusion MRI (MDM) dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of delineation performance when compared to seven state-of-the-art approaches.

FlowSE: Efficient and High-Quality Speech Enhancement via Flow Matching

Generative models have excelled in audio tasks using approaches such as language models, diffusion, and flow matching. However, existing generative approaches for speech enhancement (SE) face notable challenges: language model-based methods suffer from quantization loss, leading to compromised speaker similarity and intelligibility, while diffusion models require complex training and high inference latency. To address these challenges, we propose FlowSE, a flow-matching-based model for SE. Flow matching learns a continuous transformation between noisy and clean speech distributions in a single pass, significantly reducing inference latency while maintaining high-quality reconstruction. Specifically, FlowSE trains on noisy mel spectrograms and optional character sequences, optimizing a conditional flow matching loss with ground-truth mel spectrograms as supervision. It implicitly learns speech's temporal-spectral structure and text-speech alignment. During inference, FlowSE can operate with or without textual information, achieving impressive results in both scenarios, with further improvements when transcripts are available. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowSE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative methods, establishing a new paradigm for generative-based SE and demonstrating the potential of flow matching to advance the field. Our code, pre-trained checkpoints, and audio samples are available.

MM-MovieDubber: Towards Multi-Modal Learning for Multi-Modal Movie Dubbing

Current movie dubbing technology can produce the desired speech using a reference voice and input video, maintaining perfect synchronization with the visuals while effectively conveying the intended emotions. However, crucial aspects of movie dubbing, including adaptation to various dubbing styles, effective handling of dialogue, narration, and monologues, as well as consideration of subtle details such as speaker age and gender, remain insufficiently explored. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a multi-modal generative framework. First, it utilizes a multi-modal large vision-language model (VLM) to analyze visual inputs, enabling the recognition of dubbing types and fine-grained attributes. Second, it produces high-quality dubbing using large speech generation models, guided by multi-modal inputs. Additionally, a movie dubbing dataset with annotations for dubbing types and subtle details is constructed to enhance movie understanding and improve dubbing quality for the proposed multi-modal framework. Experimental results across multiple benchmark datasets show superior performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In details, the LSE-D, SPK-SIM, EMO-SIM, and MCD exhibit improvements of up to 1.09%, 8.80%, 19.08%, and 18.74%, respectively.

Selective Invocation for Multilingual ASR: A Cost-effective Approach Adapting to Speech Recognition Difficulty

Although multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have significantly advanced, enabling a single model to handle multiple languages, inherent linguistic differences and data imbalances challenge SOTA performance across all languages. While language identification (LID) models can route speech to the appropriate ASR model, they incur high costs from invoking SOTA commercial models and suffer from inaccuracies due to misclassification. To overcome these, we propose SIMA, a selective invocation for multilingual ASR that adapts to the difficulty level of the input speech. Built on a spoken large language model (SLLM), SIMA evaluates whether the input is simple enough for direct transcription or requires the invocation of a SOTA ASR model. Our approach reduces word error rates by 18.7% compared to the SLLM and halves invocation costs compared to LID-based methods. Tests on three datasets show that SIMA is a scalable, cost-effective solution for multilingual ASR applications.