T1: Tool-integrated Self-verification for Test-time Compute Scaling in Small Language Models

Recent studies have demonstrated that test-time compute scaling effectively improves the performance of small language models (sLMs). However, prior research has mainly examined test-time compute scaling with an additional larger model as a verifier, leaving self-verification by sLMs underexplored. In this work, we investigate whether sLMs can reliably self-verify their outputs under test-time scaling. We find that even with knowledge distillation from larger verifiers, sLMs struggle with verification tasks requiring memorization, such as numerical calculations and fact-checking. To address this limitation, we propose Tool-integrated self-verification (T1), which delegates memorization-heavy verification steps to external tools, such as a code interpreter. Our theoretical analysis shows that tool integration reduces memorization demands and improves test-time scaling performance. Experiments on the MATH benchmark demonstrate that, with T1, a Llama-3.2 1B model under test-time scaling outperforms the significantly larger Llama-3.1 8B model. Moreover, T1 generalizes effectively to both mathematical (MATH500) and multi-domain knowledge-intensive tasks (MMLU-Pro). Our findings highlight the potential of tool integration to substantially improve the self-verification abilities of sLMs.

SafeRoute: Adaptive Model Selection for Efficient and Accurate Safety Guardrails in Large Language Models

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications requires robust safety guard models to detect and block harmful user prompts. While large safety guard models achieve strong performance, their computational cost is substantial. To mitigate this, smaller distilled models are used, but they often underperform on "hard" examples where the larger model provides accurate predictions. We observe that many inputs can be reliably handled by the smaller model, while only a small fraction require the larger model's capacity. Motivated by this, we propose SafeRoute, a binary router that distinguishes hard examples from easy ones. Our method selectively applies the larger safety guard model to the data that the router considers hard, improving efficiency while maintaining accuracy compared to solely using the larger safety guard model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our adaptive model selection significantly enhances the trade-off between computational cost and safety performance, outperforming relevant baselines.

Stable-TTS: Stable Speaker-Adaptive Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Prosody Prompting

Speaker-adaptive Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis has attracted considerable attention due to its broad range of applications, such as personalized voice assistant services. While several approaches have been proposed, they often exhibit high sensitivity to either the quantity or the quality of target speech samples. To address these limitations, we introduce Stable-TTS, a novel speaker-adaptive TTS framework that leverages a small subset of a high-quality pre-training dataset, referred to as prior samples. Specifically, Stable-TTS achieves prosody consistency by leveraging the high-quality prosody of prior samples, while effectively capturing the timbre of the target speaker. Additionally, it employs a prior-preservation loss during fine-tuning to maintain the synthesis ability for prior samples to prevent overfitting on target samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Stable-TTS even under limited amounts of and noisy target speech samples.

Latent Paraphrasing: Perturbation on Layers Improves Knowledge Injection in Language Models

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in specialized domains with continuously evolving knowledge, the need for timely and precise knowledge injection has become essential. Fine-tuning with paraphrased data is a common approach to enhance knowledge injection, yet it faces two significant challenges: high computational costs due to repetitive external model usage and limited sample diversity. To this end, we introduce LaPael, a latent-level paraphrasing method that applies input-dependent noise to early LLM layers. This approach enables diverse and semantically consistent augmentations directly within the model. Furthermore, it eliminates the recurring costs of paraphrase generation for each knowledge update. Our extensive experiments on question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that LaPael improves knowledge injection over standard fine-tuning and existing noise-based approaches. Additionally, combining LaPael with data-level paraphrasing further enhances performance.

HarmAug: Effective Data Augmentation for Knowledge Distillation of Safety Guard Models

Safety guard models that detect malicious queries aimed at large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring the secure and responsible deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. However, deploying existing safety guard models with billions of parameters alongside LLMs on mobile devices is impractical due to substantial memory requirements and latency. To reduce this cost, we distill a large teacher safety guard model into a smaller one using a labeled dataset of instruction-response pairs with binary harmfulness labels. Due to the limited diversity of harmful instructions in the existing labeled dataset, naively distilled models tend to underperform compared to larger models. To bridge the gap between small and large models, we propose HarmAug, a simple yet effective data augmentation method that involves jailbreaking an LLM and prompting it to generate harmful instructions. Given a prompt such as, "Make a single harmful instruction prompt that would elicit offensive content", we add an affirmative prefix (e.g., "I have an idea for a prompt:") to the LLM's response. This encourages the LLM to continue generating the rest of the response, leading to sampling harmful instructions. Another LLM generates a response to the harmful instruction, and the teacher model labels the instruction-response pair. We empirically show that our HarmAug outperforms other relevant baselines. Moreover, a 435-million-parameter safety guard model trained with HarmAug achieves an F1 score comparable to larger models with over 7 billion parameters, and even outperforms them in AUPRC, while operating at less than 25% of their computational cost.

Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Verification

Recent Language Models (LMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating texts with the knowledge internalized in parameters. Yet, LMs often generate the factually incorrect responses to the given queries, since their knowledge may be inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated. To address this problem, previous works propose to augment LMs with the knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge source. However, such approaches often show suboptimal text generation performance due to two reasons: 1) the model may fail to retrieve the knowledge relevant to the given query, or 2) the model may not faithfully reflect the retrieved knowledge in the generated text. To overcome these, we propose to verify the output and the knowledge of the knowledge-augmented LMs with a separate verifier, which is a small LM that is trained to detect those two types of errors through instruction-finetuning. Then, when the verifier recognizes an error, we can rectify it by either retrieving new knowledge or generating new text. Further, we use an ensemble of the outputs from different instructions with a single verifier to enhance the reliability of the verification processes. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed verification steps on multiple question answering benchmarks, whose results show that the proposed verifier effectively identifies retrieval and generation errors, allowing LMs to provide more factually correct outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/JinheonBaek/KALMV.

Knowledge Graph-Augmented Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation

Language models have achieved impressive performances on dialogue generation tasks. However, when generating responses for a conversation that requires factual knowledge, they are far from perfect, due to an absence of mechanisms to retrieve, encode, and reflect the knowledge in the generated responses. Some knowledge-grounded dialogue generation methods tackle this problem by leveraging facts from Knowledge Graphs (KGs); however, they do not guarantee that the model utilizes a relevant piece of knowledge from the KG. To overcome this limitation, we propose SUbgraph Retrieval-augmented GEneration (SURGE), a framework for generating context-relevant and knowledge-grounded dialogues with the KG. Specifically, our SURGE framework first retrieves the relevant subgraph from the KG, and then enforces consistency across facts by perturbing their word embeddings conditioned by the retrieved subgraph. Then, we utilize contrastive learning to ensure that the generated texts have high similarity to the retrieved subgraphs. We validate our SURGE framework on OpendialKG and KOMODIS datasets, showing that it generates high-quality dialogues that faithfully reflect the knowledge from KG.

Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks that require a compound understanding of knowledge. However, deployment of the LLMs in real-world applications can be challenging due to their high computational requirements and concerns on data privacy. Previous studies have focused on building task-specific small language models (LMs) by fine-tuning them with labeled data or distilling LLMs. However, these approaches are ill-suited for knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks due to the limited capacity of small LMs in memorizing the knowledge required. Motivated by our theoretical analysis on memorization, we propose Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation (KARD), a novel method that fine-tunes small LMs to generate rationales with augmented knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge base. Moreover, we further propose a neural reranker to obtain documents relevant to rationale generation. We empirically show that KARD significantly improves the performance of small T5 and Flan-T5 models on the challenging knowledge-intensive reasoning datasets, namely MedQA-USMLE and StrategyQA. Notably, our method makes the 250M models achieve superior performance against the fine-tuned 3B models, having 12 times larger parameters, on both MedQA-USMLE and StrategyQA benchmarks.

ZET-Speech: Zero-shot adaptive Emotion-controllable Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Diffusion and Style-based Models

Emotional Text-To-Speech (TTS) is an important task in the development of systems (e.g., human-like dialogue agents) that require natural and emotional speech. Existing approaches, however, only aim to produce emotional TTS for seen speakers during training, without consideration of the generalization to unseen speakers. In this paper, we propose ZET-Speech, a zero-shot adaptive emotion-controllable TTS model that allows users to synthesize any speaker's emotional speech using only a short, neutral speech segment and the target emotion label. Specifically, to enable a zero-shot adaptive TTS model to synthesize emotional speech, we propose domain adversarial learning and guidance methods on the diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that ZET-Speech successfully synthesizes natural and emotional speech with the desired emotion for both seen and unseen speakers. Samples are at https://ZET-Speech.github.io/ZET-Speech-Demo/.

Any-speaker Adaptive Text-To-Speech Synthesis with Diffusion Models

There has been a significant progress in Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis technology in recent years, thanks to the advancement in neural generative modeling. However, existing methods on any-speaker adaptive TTS have achieved unsatisfactory performance, due to their suboptimal accuracy in mimicking the target speakers' styles. In this work, we present Grad-StyleSpeech, which is an any-speaker adaptive TTS framework that is based on a diffusion model that can generate highly natural speech with extremely high similarity to target speakers' voice, given a few seconds of reference speech. Grad-StyleSpeech significantly outperforms recent speaker-adaptive TTS baselines on English benchmarks. Audio samples are available at https://nardien.github.io/grad-stylespeech-demo.