Papers for

hearing aid developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Xiaomi model transcribes speakers separately in noisy group settings

Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 Technical Report

Abstract: Recently, large language model (LLM) based ASR models have achieved significant progress, yet they generally lack support for multi-speaker scenarios, where the cocktail party problem remains a critical bottleneck for further advancing ASR. Existing TS-ASR methods, including end-to-end architectures with speaker embeddings and latest LLM-based explorations suffer from degraded single-speaker performance and the inability to reject when the target speaker is absent. In this paper, we propose Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1, an LLM-based end-to-end TS-ASR architecture. By utilizing reference speech as voiceprint prompts, it directly transcribes the target speaker's speech without requiring speech separation. Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 maintains competitive performance in single-speaker scenarios, comparable to mainstream ASR models. It also features a negative sample rejection capability, outputting empty text when the target speaker is absent from the mixed speech. Additionally, Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 supports a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning mode to provide explicit reasoning steps. Extensive experiments on various synthetic and real-world multispeaker benchmarks demonstrate that Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the cocktail party problem through a unified architecture that balances multispeaker and single-speaker recognition accuracy, along with rejection capability.

Thu 10 SeptSoundComputation and Language
The gist
Hearing and understanding speech when many people talk at once is a tough problem for computers, like trying to focus on one conversation at a noisy party. The authors introduce Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1, a new speech recognition system that can pick out what a single target speaker is saying even when others are talking too, without needing to separate all voices first. It also knows when the target speaker isn't speaking and doesn't produce confusing text. This model is competitive when only one person talks and works well in multi-speaker situations, advancing the ability to understand overlapping speech.
Open 2609.11274v1