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Conversational Speech Reveals Structural Robustness Failures in SpeechLLM Backbones

Maria Teleki, Sai Janjur, Haoran Liu, Oliver Grabner, Ketan Verma, Thomas Docog, Xiangjue Dong, Lingfeng Shi, Cong Wang, Stephanie Birkelbach, Jason Kim, Yin Zhang, Éva Székely, James Caverlee · Sep 24, 2025 · Citations: 0

How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood. Conversational speech contains pervasive disfluencies -- interjections, edits, and parentheticals -- that are rare in the written corpora used for pre-training. Because gold disfluency removal is a deletion-only task, it serves as a controlled probe to determine whether a model performs faithful structural repair or biased reinterpretation. Using the DRES evaluation framework, we evaluate proprietary and open-source LLMs across architectures and scales. We show that model performance clusters into stable precision-recall regimes reflecting distinct editing policies. Notably, reasoning models systematically over-delete fluent content, revealing a bias toward semantic abstraction over structural fidelity. While fine-tuning achieves SOTA results, it harms generalization. Our findings demonstrate that robustness to speech is shaped by specific training objectives.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 35%

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood."

Reported Metrics

partial

Precision, Recall

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"We show that model performance clusters into stable precision-recall regimes reflecting distinct editing policies."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

precisionrecall

Research Brief

Metadata summary

LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • LLMs serve as the backbone in SpeechLLMs, yet their behavior on spontaneous conversational input remains poorly understood.
  • Conversational speech contains pervasive disfluencies -- interjections, edits, and parentheticals -- that are rare in the written corpora used for pre-training.
  • Because gold disfluency removal is a deletion-only task, it serves as a controlled probe to determine whether a model performs faithful structural repair or biased reinterpretation.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Using the DRES evaluation framework, we evaluate proprietary and open-source LLMs across architectures and scales.
  • We show that model performance clusters into stable precision-recall regimes reflecting distinct editing policies.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Using the DRES evaluation framework, we evaluate proprietary and open-source LLMs across architectures and scales.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: precision, recall

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Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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