SpecAugment is the dominant speech augmentation policy, but researchers have studied it primarily for automatic speech recognition (ASR), and it operates on spectrograms, limiting its applicability to other speech tasks and waveform models. We propose Wav2Aug, a drop-in waveform augmentation policy that randomly samples two augmentations from a calibrated pool of waveform transformations. We calibrate the augmentation hyperparameters once and reuse them across tasks and architectures, eliminating task-specific tuning. Experiments on ten speech benchmarks show that Wav2Aug achieves ASR performance comparable to SpecAugment while improving over it on average across non-ASR tasks, yielding an average relative error reduction of 12.8% over the strongest compatible SpecAugment baseline. We further show that multi-view training provides additional gains, with two augmented views offering the best tradeoff between performance and computational cost.
Matthieu Cervera, Francesco Paissan, Micael Antunes, Mirco Ravanelli, Ricard Marxer, Cem Subakan
Neural music editing requires a system to perform a requested change while preserving the musical content that should remain unchanged. Existing evaluations often lack a paired target edit, making these requirements difficult to measure separately. We introduce SMEBench, a large-scale benchmark of controlled music edits constructed by modifying symbolic MIDI performances and rendering matched source and target audio. Each example contains a source, an instruction, a paired target, edit metadata, and complementary descriptions. The benchmark covers twelve instrumentation, articulation, dynamics, and pitch operations and includes a balanced 3,600-example test set together with a smaller real-audio complement derived from multitrack recordings. The paired targets allow source preservation, target agreement, and textual compatibility to be evaluated independently. We use these references to diagnose common audio-editing metrics and benchmark six representative editing systems, showing that the metric used to rank a system can materially change the conclusion. The dataset is available at our repository.
Masked diffusion models have seen great success in capturing data distributions over discrete sequences in domains such as text and proteins. These models generate data by iteratively unmasking tokens starting from a fully masked sequence, with the unmasking order typically chosen at random or using a heuristic based on denoiser probabilities. In this work, we propose a scheme for learning the unmasking order using an additional lightweight policy network on top of a diffusion model. Our proposed loss reweights terms in the masked diffusion loss according to policy probabilities, and results in a policy that prefers positions where the denoiser is more likely to be correct. We study this loss in two settings: (i) training solely the policy while using a frozen pre-trained denoiser, and (ii) training the policy and denoiser jointly with the weighted loss to allow for mutual adaptation. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms common heuristics on problems that are sensitive to token ordering, such as combinatorial problems, proteins as well as various coding and language tasks.
Jihoon Jeong, Mirco Ravanelli, Zhepei Wang, Cem Subakan
Reasoning is increasingly important for large audio-language models (LALMs), yet remains relatively underexplored compared with text-only and vision-language models. We introduce Audio-R1, a reinforcement learning (RL) post-training framework that revisits audio self-supervised learning as a source of verifiable rewards for improving audio understanding and reasoning task performance. Audio-R1 uses answers automatically determined during the construction of self-supervised tasks to verify model responses and compute rewards. Experiments across multiple LALMs and diverse audio benchmarks show consistent performance gains, while ablations demonstrate the benefits of each self-supervised task and additional gains from joint training. While both supervised fine-tuning and Audio-R1 improve self-supervised task accuracy, Audio-R1 further improves performance on downstream tasks distinct from the training tasks. These results highlight the potential of RL post-training with self-supervised audio tasks to improve downstream performance and reasoning-trace quality.