SageLM: A Multi-aspect and Explainable Large Language Model for Speech Judgement

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Yangfan Du, Yuan Ge, Yuxin Huang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Xiangnan Ma, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kaiyang Ye, Zhengtao Yu, Linfeng Zhang
+2 more Junxiang Zhang, JingBo Zhu
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Speech-to-Speech (S2S) Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational to natural human-computer interaction, enabling end-to-end spoken dialogue systems. However, evaluating these models remains a fundamental challenge. We propose SageLM, an end-to-end, multi-aspect, and explainable speech LLM for comprehensive S2S LLMs evaluation. First, unlike cascaded approaches that disregard acoustic features, SageLM jointly assesses both semantic and acoustic dimensions. Second, it leverages rationale-based supervision to enhance explainability and guide model learning, achieving superior alignment with evaluation outcomes compared to rule-based reinforcement learning methods. Third, we introduce SpeechFeedback, a synthetic preference dataset, and employ a two-stage training paradigm to mitigate the scarcity of speech preference data. Trained on both semantic and acoustic dimensions, SageLM achieves an 82.79\% agreement rate with human evaluators, outperforming cascaded and SLM-based baselines by at least 7.42\% and 26.20\%, respectively.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Speech Recognition and Synthesis Speech and dialogue systems Speech and Audio Processing

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN