HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.29120 (cs)
[Submitted on 29 Aug 2026]
Title:HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding
Authors:Dongwook Lee, Sangkwon Park, Eunwoo Song, Che Hyun Lee, Youngho Cho, Junho Kim, June Young Yi, Heeseung Kim, Sungroh Yoon
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Abstract:Speech Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-speaker environments, yet their ability to attribute speech to the correct speaker and reason over speaker identities remains unclear. Hence, we introduce HEAR, a conceptually hierarchical benchmark diagnosing the foundational capabilities of speaker-attributed reasoning, comprising 2.4K human-verified samples from 887 diverse multi-party audio clips. Evaluating 20 leading SLMs on HEAR reveals they struggle with these foundational tasks, often relying on semantic priors rather than actual vocal cues. To address this, we present A2R, a 30B model optimized on Counterfactual Audio with Speaker-level Hard negatives (CASH), a dataset designed to guide the model to prioritize acoustic vocal cues over linguistic signals. A2R achieves strong performance on HEAR and exhibits zero-shot generalization to diverse multi-speaker downstream tasks, demonstrating that learned speaker attribution unlocks the model's latent capacity for speaker-aware reasoning. All resources are available at this https URL
| Comments: | EMNLP2026 Main Conference |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Sound (cs.SD) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.29120 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.29120v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29120
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding, by Dongwook Lee and 8 other authors
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