Text-to-speech systems are improving fast, but measuring how natural they sound still requires expensive human listening tests. Existing automatic methods struggle to generalise well across different datasets. We present QMOS, a MOS prediction framework that extracts hierarchical speech quality features from a frozen Qwen2-Audio large audio language model and combines them with layer-weighted WavLM SSL representations through a learned cross-attention fusion. This design captures both high-level semantic naturalness and lowlevel acoustic distortions in a unified model. On two standard benchmarks, SOMOS and BVCC, QMOS achieves competitive system-level SRCC of 0.923 and 0.921 on SOMOS and BVCC, respectively, while using no system-ID conditioning or listener embeddings. Cross-domain evaluation yields a competitive SRCC of 0.702, suggesting the learned representations generalise across acoustic domains.
Sri Ravi Sastry Kolluru, Charan Devarakonda, S. Radhe et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Developing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for specialized medical domains is challenging in lowresource settings due to the limited availability of annotated speech data. Synthetic speech generated using text to speech (TTS) systems is often used to augment training data, but directly mixing synthetic and real speech can introduce distribution mismatch that degrades encoder representations. This work introduces Real-Governed Representation-Calibrated Training (RG-RCT), a training strategy that regulates the influence of synthetic speech at the representation level. The proposed framework combines reliability-based confidence estimation, representation alignment, and layer-wise representation governance to stabilize the encoder feature space while preserving acoustic diversity from multi-speaker synthetic data. Experiments on medical-domain speech datasets using Wav2Vec2 and Whisper demonstrate that RG-RCT consistently outperforms conventional strategies such as direct mixing and confidence-aware training. The proposed method achieves the lowest Word Error Rate (WER), reaching 17.1% and 16.6% for Telugu and 23.3% and 25.6% for Kannada. These results indicate that regulating encoder representation geometry enables more effective utilization of synthetic speech for low-resource medical ASR.
S. Devarakonda, Ravi Sastry Kolluru, Srihari Bandarupalli et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations