Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shi, Jiacheng, Du, Hongfei, Hong, Y. Alicia, Gao, Ye
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25495
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918321775968256
author Shi, Jiacheng
Du, Hongfei
Hong, Y. Alicia
Gao, Ye
author_facet Shi, Jiacheng
Du, Hongfei
Hong, Y. Alicia
Gao, Ye
contents Speech emotion recognition (SER) with audio-language models (ALMs) remains vulnerable to distribution shifts at test time, leading to performance degradation in out-of-domain scenarios. Test-time adaptation (TTA) provides a promising solution but often relies on gradient-based updates or prompt tuning, limiting flexibility and practicality. We propose Emo-TTA, a lightweight, training-free adaptation framework that incrementally updates class-conditional statistics via an Expectation-Maximization procedure for explicit test-time distribution estimation, using ALM predictions as priors. Emo-TTA operates on individual test samples without modifying model weights. Experiments on six out-of-domain SER benchmarks show consistent accuracy improvements over prior TTA baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of statistical adaptation in aligning model predictions with evolving test distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25495
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EMO-TTA: Improving Test-Time Adaptation of Audio-Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition
Shi, Jiacheng
Du, Hongfei
Hong, Y. Alicia
Gao, Ye
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Speech emotion recognition (SER) with audio-language models (ALMs) remains vulnerable to distribution shifts at test time, leading to performance degradation in out-of-domain scenarios. Test-time adaptation (TTA) provides a promising solution but often relies on gradient-based updates or prompt tuning, limiting flexibility and practicality. We propose Emo-TTA, a lightweight, training-free adaptation framework that incrementally updates class-conditional statistics via an Expectation-Maximization procedure for explicit test-time distribution estimation, using ALM predictions as priors. Emo-TTA operates on individual test samples without modifying model weights. Experiments on six out-of-domain SER benchmarks show consistent accuracy improvements over prior TTA baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of statistical adaptation in aligning model predictions with evolving test distributions.
title EMO-TTA: Improving Test-Time Adaptation of Audio-Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25495