ProKWS: Personalized Keyword Spotting via Collaborative Learning of Phonemes and Prosody

In this paper, we present PromptKWS, a novel Prompt-guided keyword spotting (KWS) framework to improve the accuracy of open vocabulary KWS systems. In specific terms, we introduce the Prompt Phrases Prediction Network (PPN), an encoder-decoder architecture designed to effectively extract keyword prompts embeddings. we employ the PPN encoder to encode the keyword prompts and infuse the prompt embedding into the Prompt-guided KWS encoder by utilizing a Prompt-acoustic Multi-head Cross-attention (MHCA). Experiments show that PromptKWS improves the wakeup rate by over 10% compared to baseline system. Notably, another strength of PromptKWS is its ability to effectively leverage keyword prompts for adapting to complex real-world environments involving noise and pronunciation variations. In comparison to purely acoustic models, which often struggle in such situations, PromptKWS demonstrates remarkable performance, with an average accuracy improvement of over 15% in test sets.

User-defined keyword spotting (KWS) is crucial for personalized voice interaction, yet existing methods face several challenges: (1) insufficient discriminability among confusable words, (2) performance inconsistency across speakers with varying pronunciations, and (3) high data cost to ensure reliable wake-word performance. In this paper, we introduce DMA-KWS, an efficient and robust framework for user-defined keyword spotting. First, it adopts a dual-stage matching pipeline: CTC decoding with streaming phoneme search to locate candidate segments, followed by QbyT with a phoneme matcher for fine-grained verification, enabling it to better distinguish confusable words. Next, multi-modal enrollment fuses user-specific speech with text embeddings to further improve accuracy for registered users. Finally, a parameter-efficient continual adaptation mechanism performs lightweight updates using synthetic and real data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of DMA-KWS. On the LibriPhrase Hard subset, it achieves 97.85% AUC and 6.13% EER, reaching state-of-the-art performance. In speaker-dependent settings, DMA-KWS consistently outperforms text-only enrollment, demonstrating significant performance gains. Moreover, the proposed parameter-efficient fine-tuning mechanism adapts DMA-KWS with only 187k updated parameters, further enhancing KWS performance while ensuring suitability for on-device deployment.

User-defined keyword spotting (KWS) enables personalized voice interaction by detecting user-specified keywords. A key challenge in this task is distinguishing target keywords from phonetically confusable alternatives. To address this challenge, we propose KFC-KWS, a multimodal framework that leverages connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-guided keyframe selection. Specifically, we exploit the peaky posterior distributions of CTC to identify high-confidence phoneme frames, enabling precise alignment across audio, phoneme, and text modalities. These keyframes are then fused with full-utterance representations through cross-attention to capture both local discriminative cues and global contextual information. On LibriPhrase, KFC-KWS achieves the best-balanced performance (98.73% AUC) and substantially outperforms advanced baselines on the challenging hard subset (97.65% AUC and 7.75% EER), demonstrating its effectiveness in discriminating between highly confusable keywords.