Papers by Rafael Valle
Speech-Hands: A Self-Reflection Voice Agentic Approach to Speech Recognition and Audio Reasoning with Omni Perception (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Jinchuan Tian, Hanrong Ye, Ankita Pasad, Szu-Wei Fu, Arushi Goel, Ryo Hachiuma, Shizhe Diao, Kunal Dhawan, Sreyan Ghosh, Yusuke Hirota, Zhehuai Chen, Rafael Valle, Chenhui Chu, Shinji Watanabe, Boris Ginsburg, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
| Challenge: | naively fine-tuning an omni-model on speech recognition and external sound understanding tasks often degrades performance . Xie and Wu's framework, Speech-Hands, recasts the problem as an explicit self-reflection decision. |
| Approach: | They propose a voice-agentic framework that learns one critical omni-understanding skill: trusting itself versus external audio perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the OpenASR leaderboard by 12.1% WER and high F1 on audio QA decisions. |
Koel-TTS: Enhancing LLM based Speech Generation with Preference Alignment and Classifier Free Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shehzeen Samarah Hussain, Paarth Neekhara, Xuesong Yang, Edresson Casanova, Subhankar Ghosh, Roy Fejgin, Mikyas T. Desta, Rafael Valle, Jason Li
| Challenge: | Autoregressive speech token generation models suffer from hallucinations and undesired vocalizations that do not conform to conditioning inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder transformer model that improves contextual adherence of speech token generation LLMs through preference alignment and classifier-free guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous LLM-based models on intelligibility, speaker similarity and naturalness. |