Current multilingual benchmarks cover only a fraction of the languages represented in modern pretraining corpora and often conflate language proficiency with the ability to answer questions grounded in specific regions and communities. We introduce INCLUDE-2.0, a large-scale benchmark for region-aware multilingual factual evaluation, which covers 91 languages from 86 countries (127 total language–country pairs), comprising over 220K curated samples drawn from native regional sources. Unlike existing benchmarks that often treat language as a proxy for region, IINCLUDE-2.0 distinguishes between questions whose answers are independent of context, vary by country, concern widely documented facts about a place, or depend on knowledge primarily expressed through local linguistic and cultural sources. Each item is annotated with its regional knowledge type and domain, and paired with an English translation, enabling controlled analysis of the relationship between language proficiency and possession of regional knowledge.

Evaluating frontier and open-weight models on IINCLUDE-2.0, we find that aggregate multilingual accuracy masks substantial variation across regional knowledge types, languages, and regions. We find that frontier models perform worse on locally embedded knowledge than on widely documented facts about regions, with an average drop of ~14.5 points. We also show that for open-weight models, scale improves accuracy but does not reliably make performance invariant to whether a question is asked in English or its original language. INCLUDE-2.0 is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/epfl-nlp/include-2.0

Modelling prosody variation is critical for synthesizing natural and expressive speech in end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems. In this paper, a cross-utterance conditional VAE (CUC-VAE) is proposed to estimate a posterior probability distribution of the latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features obtained from both past and future sentences. At inference time, instead of the standard Gaussian distribution used by VAE, CUC-VAE allows sampling from an utterance-specific prior distribution conditioned on cross-utterance information, which allows the prosody features generated by the TTS system to be related to the context and is more similar to how humans naturally produce prosody. The performance of CUC-VAE is evaluated via a qualitative listening test for naturalness, intelligibility and quantitative measurements, including word error rates and the standard deviation of prosody attributes. Experimental results on LJ-Speech and LibriTTS data show that the proposed CUC-VAE TTS system improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins.