Text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention, primarily for their capabilities in text-based interactions. However, natural human interaction often relies on speech, highlighting the need for voice-based models. In this context, Speech Language Models (SpeechLMs)—foundation models designed to understand and generate speech—emerge as a promising solution for end-to-end speech interaction. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of recent approaches to building SpeechLMs, outlining their core architectural components, training methodologies, evaluation strategies, and the challenges and potential directions for future research in this rapidly advancing field. The GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/dreamtheater123/Awesome-SpeechLM-Survey

Large language models (LLMs) have been used to synthesize persuasive dialogues for studying persuasive behavior. However, existing approaches often suffer from issues such as stance oscillation and low informativeness. To address these challenges, we propose reinforced instructional prompting, a method that ensures speaker characteristics consistently guide all stages of dialogue generation. We further introduce multilingual prompting, which aligns language use with speakers’ native languages to better capture cultural nuances. Our experiments involving speakers from eight countries show that continually reinforcing speaker profiles and cultural context improves argument diversity, enhances informativeness, and stabilizes speaker stances. Moreover, our analysis of inter-group versus intra-group persuasion reveals that speakers engaging within their own cultural groups employ more varied persuasive strategies than in cross-cultural interactions. These findings underscore the importance of speaker and cultural awareness in LLM-based persuasion modeling and suggest new directions for developing more personalized, ethically grounded, and culturally adaptive LLM-generated dialogues.

Tabular-format data is widely adopted in various real-world applications. Various machine learning models have achieved remarkable success in both industrial applications and data-science competitions. Despite these successes, most current machine learning methods for tabular data lack accurate confidence estimation, which is needed by some high-risk sensitive applications such as credit modeling and financial fraud detection. In this paper, we study the confidence estimation of machine learning models applied to tabular data. The key finding of our paper is that a real-world tabular dataset typically contains implicit sample relations, and this can further help to obtain a more accurate estimation. To this end, we introduce a general post-training confidence calibration framework named RECAL to calibrate the predictive confidence of current machine learning models by employing graph neural networks to model the relations between different samples. We perform extensive experiments on tabular datasets with both implicit and explicit graph structures and show that RECAL can significantly improve the calibration quality compared to the conventional method without considering the sample relations.