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ParA-LLM: A Unified Approach to Paralinguistic and Acoustic Speech Understanding

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 19, 2026 · UTC

Recent advances in Audio LLMs have achieved human-level speech recognition, yet existing systems struggle to capture paralinguistic aspects such as speaker traits, expressive variations, and environmental acoustic conditions. To address this, we design a framework of 22 paralinguistic characteristics and create a dataset of over 1.2M Audio-QA pairs. We develop ParA-LLM, trained with a two-stage curriculum: first on single-attribute questions to build foundational knowledge, then on multi-attribute questions for joint reasoning over speaker and acoustic characteristics. We also release ParA-Ben

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-23T12:01:45.602Z. This is not the publication date.