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Autori principali: Kataria, Saurabh, Hu, Xiao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23057
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author Kataria, Saurabh
Hu, Xiao
author_facet Kataria, Saurabh
Hu, Xiao
contents Audio-Language Models (ALMs) are making strides in understanding speech and non-speech audio. However, domain-specialist Foundation Models (FMs) remain the best for closed-ended speech processing tasks such as Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). Using ALMs for Zero-shot SER is a popular choice, but their potential to work with specialists to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance remains unexplored. We propose ZS-Fuse, a late-fusion method that combines zero-shot emotion estimates from a dual-encoder ALM with specialist FMs. To handle ambiguity in emotions and sensitivity to prompt choice, 1) we use a simple prompt ensemble and 2) suggest a novel technique called prompt amplification, which repeats audio and text queries to discover stronger zero-shot capabilities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique by evaluating ZS-Fuse with three dual-encoder ALMs and two FMs, and report improvements over SOTA baselines, such as WavLM-Large, on three speech emotion recognition datasets.
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spellingShingle Prompt Amplification and Zero-Shot Late Fusion in Audio-Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition
Kataria, Saurabh
Hu, Xiao
Audio and Speech Processing
Machine Learning
Audio-Language Models (ALMs) are making strides in understanding speech and non-speech audio. However, domain-specialist Foundation Models (FMs) remain the best for closed-ended speech processing tasks such as Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). Using ALMs for Zero-shot SER is a popular choice, but their potential to work with specialists to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance remains unexplored. We propose ZS-Fuse, a late-fusion method that combines zero-shot emotion estimates from a dual-encoder ALM with specialist FMs. To handle ambiguity in emotions and sensitivity to prompt choice, 1) we use a simple prompt ensemble and 2) suggest a novel technique called prompt amplification, which repeats audio and text queries to discover stronger zero-shot capabilities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique by evaluating ZS-Fuse with three dual-encoder ALMs and two FMs, and report improvements over SOTA baselines, such as WavLM-Large, on three speech emotion recognition datasets.
title Prompt Amplification and Zero-Shot Late Fusion in Audio-Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23057