1. Speech-LLM ICML
    ADEPT: RL-Aligned Agentic Decoding of Emotion via Evidence Probing Tools – From Consensus Learning to Ambiguity-Driven Emotion Reasoning
    Esther Sun, Bo-Hao Su, Abinay Reddy Naini, Shinji Watanabe, and Carlos Busso
    In ICML 2026
  2. Dialogue ICML
    Stream RAG: Instant and Accurate Spoken Dialogue Systems with Streaming Tool Usage
    Siddhant Arora, Haidar Khan, Kai Sun, Xin Luna Dong, Sajal Choudhary, Seungwhan Moon, Xinyuan Zhang, Adithya Sagar, Surya Teja Appini, Kaushik Patnaik, Sanat Sharma, Shinji Watanabe, Anuj Kumar, Ahmed A Aly, Yue Liu, Florian Metze, and Zhaojiang Lin
    In ICML 2026
  3. Evaluation ICML
    LALM-as-a-Judge: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models for Safety Evaluation in Multi-Turn Spoken Dialogues
    Amir Ivry, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ICML 2026
  4. Speech-LLM ICML
    AudioChat: Unified Audio Storytelling, Editing, and Understanding with Transfusion Forcing
    William Chen, Prem Seetharaman, Rithesh Kumar, Oriol Nieto, Shinji Watanabe, Justin Salamon, and Zeyu Jin
    In ICML 2026
  5. Evaluation ACL
    Full-Duplex-Bench-v2: A Multi-Turn Evaluation Framework for Duplex Dialogue Systems with an Automated Examiner
    Guan-Ting Lin, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Jiatong Shi, Kai-Wei Chang, Siddhant Arora, Shinji Watanabe, and Hung-yi Lee
    In ACL 2026
  6. ASR ACL
    POWSM: A Phonetic Open Whisper-Style Speech Foundation Model
    Chin-Jou Li, Kalvin Chang, Shikhar Bharadwaj, Eunjung Yeo, Kwanghee Choi, Jian Zhu, David R. Mortensen, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ACL 2026
  7. Evaluation ACL
    PRiSM: Benchmarking Phone Realization in Speech Models
    Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Yoonjae Kim, Kwanghee Choi, Eunjung Yeo, Ryan Soh-Eun Shim, Hanyu Zhou, Brendon Boldt, Karen Rosero, Kalvin Chang, Darsh Agrawal, Keer Xu, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Jian Zhu, Shinji Watanabe, and David R. Mortensen
    In ACL 2026
  8. SLU ACLFindings
    PlanRAG-Audio: Planning and Retrieval Augmented Generation for Long-form Audio Understanding
    Masao Someki, Chien-yu Huang, Siddhant Arora, Samuele Cornell, Markus Müller, Nathan Susanj, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan, Grant Strimel, Jing Liu, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ACLFindings 2026
  9. ASR ACL
    Speech-Hands: A Self-Reflection Voice Agentic Approach to Speech Recognition and Audio Reasoning with Omni Perception
    Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Jinchuan Tian, Hanrong Ye, Ankita Pasad, Szu-Wei Fu, Arushi Goel, Ryo Hachiuma, Shizhe Diao, Kunal Dhawan, Sreyan Ghosh, Yusuke Hirota, Zhehuai Chen, Rafael Valle, Chenhui Chu, Shinji Watanabe, Boris Ginsburg, and Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
    In ACL 2026
  10. Dialogue ACLFindings
    Optimizing Conversational Quality in Spoken Dialogue Systems with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
    Siddhant Arora, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Hayato Futami, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ACLFindings 2026
  11. Speech-LLM ICLR
    UALM: Unified Audio Language Model for Understanding, Generation and Reasoning
    Jinchuan Tian, Sang-gil Lee, Zhifeng Kong, Sreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Wenliang Dai, Zihan Liu, Hanrong Ye, Shinji Watanabe, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Rafael Valle, and Wei Ping
    In ICLR 2026
  12. SE ICLR
    MAPSS: Manifold-based Assessment of Perceptual Source Separation
    Amir Ivry, Samuele Cornell, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ICLR 2026
  13. SE ICASSP
    ICASSP 2026 URGENT Speech Enhancement Challenge
    Chenda Li, Wei Wang, Marvin Sach, Wangyou Zhang, Kohei Saijo, Samuele Cornell, Yihui Fu, Zhaoheng Ni, Tim Fingscheidt, Shinji Watanabe, and Yanmin Qian
    In ICASSP 2026
  14. ASR ICASSP
    SSVD-O: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Structured SVD for Speech Recognition
    Pu Wang, Shinji Watanabe, and Hugo Van hamme
    In ICASSP 2026
  15. Speech-LLM ICASSP
    Reasoning Beyond Majority Vote: An Explainable SpeechLM Framework for Speech Emotion Recognition
    Bo-Hao Su, Hui-Ying Shih, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Chi-Chun Lee, Carlos Busso, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ICASSP 2026
  16. SE ICASSP
    2025 URGENT Speech Enhancement Challenge Multilingual P.808 Listening Tests: Approach and Results
    Marvin Sach, Yihui Fu, Kohei Saijo, Wangyou Zhang, Samuele Cornell, Robin Scheibler, Chenda Li, Zhaoheng Ni, Anurag Kumar, Wei Wang, Yanmin Qian, Shinji Watanabe, and Tim Fingscheidt
    In ICASSP 2026
  17. Evaluation ICASSP
    Full-Duplex-Bench v1.5: Evaluating Overlap Handling for Full-Duplex Speech Models
    Guan-Ting Lin, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Qirui Wang, Jiachen Lian, Tingle Li, Shinji Watanabe, and Hung-yi Lee
    In ICASSP 2026
  18. ASR ICASSP
    CALM: Joint Contextual Acoustic-Linguistic Modeling for Personalization of Multi-Speaker ASR
    Muhammad Shakeel, Yosuke Fukumoto, Chikara Maeda, Chyi-Jiunn Lin, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ICASSP 2026
  19. Tokenizer ICASSP
    Phonological Tokenizer: Prosody-Aware Phonetic Token via Multi-Objective Fine-Tuning with Differentiable K-Means
    Kentaro Onda, Hayato Futami, Yosuke Kashiwagi, Emiru Tsunoo, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ICASSP 2026
  20. SSL ICASSP
    Online Register for Dual-Mode Self-Supervised Speech Models: Mitigating the Lack of Future Context
    Keita Goto, Takashi Maekaku, Jin Sakuma, Jinchuan Tian, Yusuke Shinohara, and Shinji Watanabe
    In ICASSP 2026
  21. Evaluation EACL
    CSPB: Conversational Speech Processing Benchmark for Self-supervised Speech Models
    Zili Huang, Matthew Maciejewski, Leibny Paola Garcia Perera, Shinji Watanabe, and Sanjeev Khudanpur
    In EACL 2026
  22. Tokenizer EACLFindings
    BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction
    Haoran Wang, Jiatong Shi, Jinchuan Tian, Bohan Li, Kai Yu, and Shinji Watanabe
    In EACLFindings 2026