Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition with Multi-Task Learning and Dynamic Feature Fusion

Honghong Wang; Jing Deng; Fanqin Meng; Rong Zheng

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2508.17878

Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition with Multi-Task Learning and Dynamic Feature Fusion

Honghong Wang·Jing Deng·Fanqin Meng·Rong Zheng

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

This study investigates fine-tuning self-supervised learn ing (SSL) models using multi-task learning (MTL) to enhance speech emotion recognition (SER). The framework simultane ously handles four related tasks: emotion recognition, gender recognition, speaker verification, and automatic speech recog nition. An innovative co-attention module is introduced to dy namically capture the interactions between features from the primary emotion classification task and auxiliary tasks, en abling context-aware fusion. Moreover, We introduce the Sam ple Weighted Focal Contrastive (SWFC) loss function to ad dress class imbalance and semantic confusion by adjusting sam ple weights for difficult and minority samples. The method is validated on the Categorical Emotion Recognition task of the Speech Emotion Recognition in Naturalistic Conditions Chal lenge, showing significant performance improvements.

Explore related subjects

cs.SD

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Honghong Wang, Jing Deng, Fanqin Meng, Rong Zheng. 2025-08-25. Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition with Multi-Task Learning and Dynamic Feature Fusion. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17878

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Streaming Generation for Music Accompaniment

Music generation models can produce high-fidelity coherent accompaniment given complete audio input, but are limited to editing and loop-based workflows. We study real-time audio-to-audio accompaniment: as a model hears an input audio stream (e.g., a singer singing), it has to also simultaneously generate in real-time a coherent accompanying stream (e.g., a guitar accompaniment). In this work, we propose a model design considering inevitable system delays in practical deployment with two design variables: future visibility $t_f$, the offset between the output playback time and the latest input time used for conditioning, and output chunk duration $k$, the number of frames emitted per call. We train Transformer decoders across a grid of $(t_f,k)$ and show two consistent trade-offs: increasing effective $t_f$ improves coherence by reducing the recency gap, but requires faster inference to stay within the latency budget; increasing $k$ improves throughput but results in degraded accompaniment due to a reduced update rate. Finally, we observe that naive maximum-likelihood streaming training is insufficient for coherent accompaniment where future context is not available, motivating advanced anticipatory and agentic objectives for live jamming.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

M-CIF: Multi-Scale Alignment For CIF-Based Non-Autoregressive ASR

The Continuous Integrate-and-Fire (CIF) mechanism provides effective alignment for non-autoregressive (NAR) speech recognition. This mechanism creates a smooth and monotonic mapping from acoustic features to target tokens, achieving performance on Mandarin competitive with other NAR approaches. However, without finer-grained guidance, its stability degrades in some languages such as English and French. In this paper, we propose Multi-scale CIF (M-CIF), which performs multi-level alignment by integrating character and phoneme level supervision progressively distilled into subword representations, thereby enhancing robust acoustic-text alignment. Experiments show that M-CIF reduces WER compared to the Paraformer baseline, especially on CommonVoice by 4.21% in German and 3.05% in French. To further investigate these gains, we define phonetic confusion errors (PE) and space-related segmentation errors (SE) as evaluation metrics. Analysis of these metrics across different M-CIF settings reveals that the phoneme and character layers are essential for enhancing progressive CIF alignment.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Decoding Order Matters in Autoregressive Speech Synthesis

Autoregressive speech synthesis often adopts a left-to-right order, yet generation order is a modelling choice. We investigate decoding order through masked diffusion framework, which progressively unmasks positions and allows arbitrary decoding orders during training and inference. By interpolating between identity and random permutations, we show that randomness in decoding order affects speech quality. We further compare fixed strategies, such as \texttt{l2r} and \texttt{r2l} with adaptive ones, such as Top-$K$, finding that fixed-order decoding, including the dominating left-to-right approach, is suboptimal, while adaptive decoding yields better performance. Finally, since masked diffusion requires discrete inputs, we quantise acoustic representations and find that even 1-bit quantisation can support reasonably high-quality speech.

cs.SD↗