Distilling reasoning traces from strong teacher models has become the standard recipe for building capable small language models. Yet reasoning traces are 5-20× longer than standard instruction fine-tuning (IFT) outputs, meaning every practitioner who chooses reasoning distillation implicitly forgoes training a larger IFT model on the same compute budget. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile remains unaddressed. We study it with a controlled experiment: a single teacher generates paired IFT and reasoning outputs for identical prompts by toggling only its reasoning mode, isolating supervision format as the sole variable. Training students at five scales (0.5B to 14B) and evaluating on 18 benchmarks, we find that at matched FLOPs, IFT lies on or near the Pareto frontier across the majority of configurations. Reasoning reaches the Pareto frontier only on open-ended tasks at 7B and above. Even there, a sequential curriculum mixing just 25-50% reasoning data with IFT captures most of the accuracy benefit at far lower compute cost.

During the last decade, the applications of signal processing have drastically improved with deep learning. However areas of affecting computing such as emotional speech synthesis or emotion recognition from spoken language remains challenging. In this paper, we investigate the use of a neural Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as a feature extractor for emotion recognition. We show that these features outperform the eGeMAPS feature set to predict the valence and arousal emotional dimensions, which means that the audio-to-text mapping learned by the ASR system contains information related to the emotional dimensions in spontaneous speech. We also examine the relationship between first layers (closer to speech) and last layers (closer to text) of the ASR and valence/arousal.

It has been shown that adding expressivity and emotional expressions to an agent’s communication systems would improve the interaction quality between this agent and a human user. In this paper we present a multimodal database of affect bursts, which are very short non-verbal expressions with facial, vocal, and gestural components that are highly synchronized and triggered by an identifiable event. This database contains motion capture and audio data of affect bursts representing disgust, startle and surprise recorded at three different levels of arousal each. This database is to be used for synthesis purposes in order to generate affect bursts of these emotions on a continuous arousal level scale.