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The Voice Behind the Words: Quantifying Intersectional Bias in SpeechLLMs

Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) process spoken input directly, retaining cues such as accent and perceived gender that were previously removed in cascaded pipelines. This introduces speaker identity dependent variation in responses. We present a large-scale intersectional evaluation of accent and gender bias in three SpeechLLMs using 2,880 controlled interactions across six English accents and two gender presentations, keeping linguistic content constant through voice cloning. Using pointwise LLM-judge ratings, pairwise comparisons, and Best-Worst Scaling with human validation, we detect recurring directional disparities. Eastern European-accented speech receives lower helpfulness scores, particularly for female-presenting voices. Responses remain polite but differ in helpfulness. While LLM judges capture the directional trend of these biases, human evaluators exhibit significantly higher sensitivity, showing stronger accent-level contrasts.

Solving Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning from an Auto-Annotation Perspective

Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) resembles real-world applications such as auto-annotation, as it aims to learn a model from a few labeled and abundant unlabeled task-specific examples to annotate the unlabeled ones. Despite the availability of powerful open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and open-world data, existing SSFSL literature largely neglects these resources. In contrast, the related area few-shot learning (FSL) has already exploited them to boost performance. Arguably, to solve real-world auto-annotation, SSFSL should leverage such open resources. To bridge this gap, we explore established SSL methods to finetune a VLM. Unexpectedly, they significantly underperform FSL baselines that do not use unlabeled data. Our in-depth analysis reveals the root cause of failure: VLMs produce flat distributions of softmax probabilities, resulting in zero utilization of unlabeled data and weak supervision signals. To address this challenge, we propose an embarrassingly simple solution that uses temperatures to sharpen the softmax output, which not only increases the confidence scores of pseudo-labels to improve the utilization of unlabeled data, but also strengthens training supervision for effective finetuning. Furthermore, we exploit task-relevant open data, e.g., those retrieved from VLMs' publicly available pretraining set. To mitigate the imbalance and domain gaps in retrieved data, we employ a stage-wise training strategy. Building on the successful finetuning of VLMs and the exploitation of open data, we present a simple yet effective SSFSL method, Stage-Wise Finetuning with Temperatures (SWIFT). Across five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms recent FSL and SSL methods by $\sim$5 accuracy points. SWIFT even rivals supervised learning, which finetunes a VLM assuming unlabeled data having ground-truth labels!