Format Inertia: A Failure Mechanism of LLMs in Medical Pre-Consultation

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have brought significant improvements to various service domains, including chatbots and medical pre-consultation applications. In the healthcare domain, the most common approach for adapting LLMs to multi-turn dialogue generation is Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, datasets for SFT in tasks like medical pre-consultation typically exhibit a skewed turn-count distribution. Training on such data induces a novel failure mechanism we term **Format Inertia**, where models tend to generate repetitive, format-correct, but diagnostically uninformative questions in long medical dialogues. To mitigate this observed failure mechanism, we adopt a simple, data-centric method that rebalances the turn-count distribution of the training dataset. Experimental results show that our approach substantially alleviates Format Inertia in medical pre-consultation.

Taxonomy of Comprehensive Safety for Clinical Agents

Safety is a paramount concern in clinical chatbot applications, where inaccurate or harmful responses can lead to serious consequences. Existing methods--such as guardrails and tool calling--often fall short in addressing the nuanced demands of the clinical domain. In this paper, we introduce TACOS (TAxonomy of COmprehensive Safety for Clinical Agents), a fine-grained, 21-class taxonomy that integrates safety filtering and tool selection into a single user intent classification step. TACOS is a taxonomy that can cover a wide spectrum of clinical and non-clinical queries, explicitly modeling varying safety thresholds and external tool dependencies. To validate our framework, we curate a TACOS-annotated dataset and perform extensive experiments. Our results demonstrate the value of a new taxonomy specialized for clinical agent settings, and reveal useful insights about train data distribution and pretrained knowledge of base models.

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.

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/.