Phonology-Aware Speaker Extraction Frontend for Audio LLMs

Target speaker extraction (TSE) is a key frontend for enabling audio large language models (LLMs) to recognize and understand a designated speaker in overlapping speech. However, multilingual mixtures exhibit heterogeneous extraction demands, causing fixed-depth systems to either under-process challenging inputs or waste computation on inputs that have already converged. Existing TSE frontends generally apply uniform computation, while Audio-LLM adaptation methods neither explicitly model language-conditioned extraction demands nor preserve plug-and-play compatibility with frozen downstream models. We therefore propose LATTE, a lightweight 5.2M-parameter frontend that combines an acoustic Difficulty Estimator, a task-adaptive phonology-informed prior learned from multi-depth TSE gains, and an Adaptive Hourglass Extractor to route each mixture without requiring language identity at inference. On PolyExtract, LATTE achieves a macro SI-SNRi of 15.07 dB at 0.30 GFLOPs, retaining performance within 0.09 dB of a 0.53-GFLOP fixed-depth model while reducing computation by 43.4%, and lowers the average WER from 16.8% to 14.6% relative to TF-GridNet. By jointly modeling sample-level extraction demands and phonological structure, LATTE provides a practical framework for quality-aware, compute-efficient multilingual TSE and offers a scalable path toward robust Audio-LLM deployment.