Abstract
Understanding human states and interaction dynamics is a core goal of human-computer interaction (HCI). As interaction paradigms become more immersive, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a powerful platform for studying collaborative work. In such settings, evaluating team collaboration states, including team performance and team resilience, requires continuous and reliable inference of latent team-level cognitive and affective states from multi-modal sensor data, such as speech signals. However, generating ground truth labels for these latent states remains challenging due to sensor-induced noise, contextual variability, and sparse expert annotations. Traditional self-reporting approaches provide only static and delayed measurements and are therefore insufficient for capturing dynamic team processes reflected in continuous speech data. In this work, we propose a large language model (LLM)-driven, agentic inference workflow for automated emotion-related synthetic ground truth generation from streaming speech data in multi-user VR environments. Leveraging the generalization capabilities of LLMs, we use In-Context Learning (ICL) with few-shot demonstrations of paired audio-based samples and their corresponding transcriptions. ICL tends to achieve task adaptation comparable to model fine-tuning while circumventing the computational overhead of parameter updates. To construct informative and robust in-context prompts, we adopt a retrieval-based selection strategy that dynamically identifies relevant audio demonstrations based on similarity in the acoustic feature space.
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Jul 17, 2026cs.SD
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Zhenqi Jia, Yuan Zhao, Aruukhan +2
Jul 2, 2026eess.AS
While Large Multimodal Models excel in comprehension, high-throughput inference engines lack native support for multimodal generation. This is severe in Speech Language Models, where generating multi-layered audio tokens via decoupled AR+NAR or synchronous Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) with delay-pattern interleaving conflicts with standard single-stream loops. We present a vLLM-based inference pipeline for unified speech understanding and generation. We extend autoregressive decoding to natively execute delay-pattern de-interleaving and coordinated multi-stream sampling, integrating an on-GPU acoustic decoder for end-to-end waveform synthesis. Crucially, we overcome the shared intuition that Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) halves throughput. By co-scheduling paired conditional and unconditional requests within a continuous batch, our CFG implementation sustains 80% of non-CFG throughput, absorbing dual-request and logit merging overheads. We open-source our framework.
Haoran Wang, Jinchuan Tian, Siddhant Arora +1
Jun 22, 2026cs.SD
Reviewing recorded interviews for affective cues such as composure, hesitation and agitation is slow and subjective, and cloud services that could automate it require sensitive audio to leave the device. EmotionAI is a fully local Computational Intelligence (CI) pipeline that couples Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) with generative reasoning. Speaker diarisation, Whisper Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and a wav2vec2 emotion classifier produce per-segment affective evidence, which is then passed to an adversarial three-model local Large Language Model (LLM) panel for timestamp-grounded and citation-constrained question answering. Zero-shot evaluation on the RAVDESS four-class English subset (n = 672) exposes cross-corpus fragility rather than classifier superiority: the deployed classifier scores 48.8% accuracy, above random (24.9%) and majority (28.6%) baselines but below an in-domain MFCC + logistic-regression comparator (71.0%). The complete pipeline runs in a mean 157 s on CPU (real-time factor approximately 1.33) with zero external calls. The contribution is not state-of-the-art SER but an auditable, privacy-preserving integration of imperfect affective evidence into grounded conversational analysis, together with an honest empirical account of where cross-corpus transfer and human-centred validation still fall short.
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