Hoang H Nguyen

Author directory

2026

Code-switching (CS), a seamless alternation between languages within a single utterance, remains a critical challenge in automatic speech recognition (ASR). While prior works focus on conversational CS-ASR, enterprise settings demand evaluation of operational impact beyond edit-distance errors: how code-switching transcription errors propagate to downstream voice agent task failures. In this work, we propose (1) a CS-ASR synthetic benchmark and multidimensional evaluation framework tailored to enterprise domains, (2) systematic evaluation of frontier ASR systems across 5 language pairs, (3) diagnostic analysis of the additional transcription errors that code-switching introduces across language pairs and models. We release CoSE-E to support enterprise-focused CS-ASR evaluation for multilingual voice agents in enterprise deployment.
Voice agents are increasingly deployed across enterprise applications. However, no existing benchmark jointly addresses realistic conversation simulation and comprehensive voice-specific evaluation. We present EVA-Bench, an end-to-end evaluation framework that addresses both. On the simulation side, EVA-Bench orchestrates dynamic bot-to-bot audio conversations with automatic simulation validation that detects user simulator error and appropriately regenerates conversations before scoring. On the measurement side, EVA-Bench introduces two composite metrics: EVA-A (Accuracy) and EVA-X (Experience). EVA-Bench includes 213 scenarios across three enterprise domains, a controlled perturbation suite for accent and noise robustness, and multi-trial measurements that distinguish peak from reliable capability. Across 12 systems spanning three architectures, we find: (1) no system simultaneously exceeds 0.5 on both EVA-A pass@1 and EVA-X pass@1; (2) peak and reliable performance diverge substantially (median pass@k - pass^k gap of 0.44 on EVA-A; and (3) accent and noise perturbations expose substantial robustness gaps, with effects varying across architectures, systems, and metrics (mean Δ up to 0.314). We release EVA-Bench under an open-source license.
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are rapidly advancing, but evaluating them remains challenging due to inefficient and non-standardized toolkits that limit fair comparison and systematic assessment. Existing evaluation frameworks exhibit three critical limitations: (1) slow and inefficient processing pipeline that bottlenecks large-scale studies, (2) inadequate multi-turn dialogue support, leaving fundamental questions about cross-turn context integration and performance dynamics over extended conversations in LALMs unanswered; and (3) the absence of unified and scalable evaluation framework capable of keeping pace with the rapid growth of both LALMs and audio benchmarks. To address these issues, we introduce **AU-Harness**, an efficient and comprehensive evaluation framework for LALMs. Our empirical studies demonstrate that AU-Harness achieves 77% reduction in evaluation processing time over existing evaluation toolkits, enabling large-scale LALM evaluations previously considered impractical. We provide standardized evaluation protocols and flexible configurations for fair model comparison across diverse scenarios. AU-Harness unlocks a range of in-depth analyses difficult to conduct without a unified foundation, including multi-turn dialogue dynamics, enabling the study of true audio reasoning capabilities in existing LALMs. AU-Harness provides both practical evaluation tools and insights into model limitations, advancing systematic LALM development.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. However, fully autonomous LLM-based agents still face significant challenges, including limited reliability due to hallucinations, difficulty in handling complex tasks, and substantial safety and ethical risks, all of which limit their feasibility and trustworthiness in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, LLM-based human-agent systems (LLM-HAS) incorporate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. These human-agent collaboration systems enable humans and LLM-based agents to collaborate effectively by leveraging their complementary strengths.This paper provides the first comprehensive and structured survey of LLM-HAS. It clarifies fundamental concepts, systematically presents core components shaping these systems, including environment and profiling, human feedback, interaction types, orchestration, and communication, explores emerging applications, and discusses unique challenges and opportunities arising from human-AI collaboration. By consolidating current knowledge and offering a structured overview, we aim to foster further research and innovation in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field. Paper lists and resources are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/Awesome-Human-Agent-Collaboration-Interaction-Systems.
Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio-LLM Judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive. We deconstruct the under-specified "naturalness" into a linguistically grounded annotation schema spanning 10 distinct perceptual dimensions, and use it to construct the first dimension-level meta-evaluation benchmark for TTS, comprising 860 utterances annotated by trained linguist raters (Krippendorff’s up to 0.821). Results from benchmarking four MOS predictors and four Audio-LLM Judges reveals that MOS predictors collapse onto acoustic signal quality, while Audio-LLM Judges show selective, prompt-dependent detection that doesnt generalise across the dimension set. Neither class reliably captures linguistically structured speech errors. Our dataset, annotation schema, and evaluation code are publicly released to support more targeted and interpretable TTS evaluation.
Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce **Anchor-gated Phonetic Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO)**, a GRPO framework with phonetic reward that aligns speech language models (SLMs) through audible-anchor preservation and inter-anchor phonetic compatibility to the original speech signal. AP-GRPO consists of: (i) an **anchor-gated reward** that matches reliable audible anchors in clear regions; and (ii) an **inter-anchor phonetic alignment reward** that evaluates whether recovered contents are phonetically supported by the corresponding corrupted inter-anchor speech span. Across four disease conditions, AP-GRPO improves faithful speech reconstruction, and the learned anchor constraint automatically adapts to each condition and thus reveals interpretable disease-specific profiles: conditions with severe articulatory degradation require stronger anchor enforcement, whereas milder impairment or linguistically impaired conditions rely more on phonetic alignment for inter-anchor recovery.

2025

Multilingual LLMs have achieved remarkable benchmark performance, but we find they continue to underperform on non-Latin script languages across contemporary LLM families. This discrepancy arises from the fact that LLMs are pretrained with orthographic scripts, which are dominated by Latin characters that obscure their shared phonology with non-Latin scripts. We propose leveraging phonemic transcriptions as complementary signals to induce script-invariant representations. Our study demonstrates that integrating phonemic signals improves performance across both non-Latin and Latin languages, with a particularly significant impact on closing the performance gap between the two. Through detailed experiments, we show that phonemic and orthographic scripts retrieve distinct examples for in-context learning (ICL). This motivates our proposed Mixed-ICL retrieval strategy, where further aggregation leads to our significant performance improvements for both Latin script languages (up to 12.6%) and non-Latin script languages (up to 15.1%) compared to randomized ICL retrieval.
Collecting instruction fine-tuning (IFT) data is a resource and time intensive task especially in multilingual setting where finding proficient native speakers is challenging. Moreover, traditional data collection is prone to privacy risks, toxicity and lacks scalability. While, fully synthetic datasets are a promising alternative, research on their use in multilingual domain is limited as existing approaches still rely on machine translation to improve multilingual performance. To bridge this gap we introduce M2Lingual, the first fully synthetic, multi-turn multilingual dataset having 175K conversations across 70 languages with a balanced mix of high, low and mid-resourced languages. M2Lingual is constructed using a cost-efficient and scalable method that uses our novel two-step Evol prompt taxonomy to transform a small set of human written instructions to complex and challenging conversations. Results across three model families, six baseline datasets and evaluation spanning 31 languages demonstrates the effectiveness of M2Lingual over other datasets.
Finding the right north-star metrics is highly critical for advancing mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models, especially given that existing evaluations are either too easy or only focusing on getting correct short answers. To address these issues, we present IMO-Bench, a suite of advanced reasoning benchmarks that specifically targets the level of the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the most prestigious venue for young mathematicians. IMOAnswerBench first tests models on 400 diverse Olympiad problems with verifiable short answers. IMO-ProofBench is the next-level evaluation for proof-writing capabilities, which includes both basic and advanced IMO problems as well as detailed grading guidelines to facilitate automatic grading. These benchmarks played a crucial role in our historic achievement of the gold-level performance at IMO 2025 with Gemini Deep Think (Luong and Lockhart, 2025). Our model achieved 80.0% on IMO-AnswerBench and 65.7% on the advanced IMO-ProofBench, surpassing the best non-Gemini models by large margins of 6.9% and 42.4% respectively. We also showed that autograders built with Gemini reasoning correlate well with human evaluations and construct IMO-GradingBench, with 1000 human gradings on proofs, to enable further progress in automatic evaluation of long-form answers. We hope that IMO-Bench will help the community towards advancing robust mathematical reasoning and release it at https://github.com/google-deepmind/superhuman/imobench.
Bronze inscriptions from early China are fragmentary and difficult to date. We introduce BIRD (Bronze Inscription Restoration and Dating), a fully encoded dataset grounded in standard scholarly transcriptions and chronological labels. We further propose an allograph-aware masked language modeling framework that integrates domain- and task-adaptive pretraining with a Glyph Net (GN), which links graphemes and allographs. Experiments show that GN improves restoration, while glyph-biased sampling yields gains in dating.