Shuai Wang, Zihan Qian, Ke Zhang, Jiangyu Han, Zikai Liu, Xiaoyang Yu, Haoyu Li, Marc Delcroix 等 12 位作者
We introduce the REAL-TSE Challenge, an IEEE SLT 2026 satellite challenge on target speaker extraction~(TSE) from real conversational recordings. Given a multi-speaker mixture and one or more enrollment utterances from a target speaker, participating systems must recover only the target speech. Unlike simulated read-speech benchmarks, REAL-TSE evaluates Mandarin and English recordings that contain natural overlap, reverberation, noise, channel mismatch, and conversational dynamics. The challenge defines two complementary tracks: an Online track for low-latency streaming extraction and an Offline track for full-context processing. Systems are evaluated with Token Error Rate (TER), Speaker Similarity (SpkSim), DNSMOS, and target-speaker activity F1. This overview paper describes the task definition, datasets, baselines, evaluation protocol, submitted systems, condition-wise findings, and lessons for future real-world TSE benchmarks.
Bingshen Mu, Xian Shi, Xiong Wang Alibaba Group, Hexin Liu, Jin Xu Alibaba Group, Lei Xie Northwest Polytechnical University
Forced alignment (FA) predicts start and end timestamps for words or characters in speech, but existing methods are language-specific and prone to cumulative temporal shifts. The multilingual speech understanding and long-sequence processing abilities of speech large language models (SLLMs) make them promising for FA in multilingual, crosslingual, and long-form speech settings. However, directly applying the next-token prediction paradigm of SLLMs to FA results in hallucinations and slow inference. To bridge the gap, we propose LLM-ForcedAligner, reformulating FA as a slot-filling paradigm: timestamps are treated as discrete indices, and special timestamp tokens are inserted as slots into the transcript. Conditioned on the speech embeddings and the transcript with slots, the SLLM directly predicts the time indices at slots. During training, causal attention masking with non-shifted input and label sequences allows each slot to predict its own timestamp index based on itself and preceding context, with loss computed only at slot positions. Dynamic slot insertion enables FA at arbitrary positions. Moreover, non-autoregressive inference is supported, avoiding hallucinations and improving speed. Experiments across multilingual, crosslingual, and long-form speech scenarios show that LLM-ForcedAligner achieves a 69% 78% relative reduction in accumulated averaging shift compared with prior methods. The checkpoint and inference code will be released later.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表