arXiv:2603.07550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accent plays a crucial role in speaker identity and inclusivity in speech technologies. Existing accented text-to-speech (TTS) systems either require large-scale accented datasets or lack fine-grained phoneme-level controllability. We propose a accented TTS framework that combines phonological rules with a multilingual TTS model. The rules are applied to phoneme sequences to transform accent at the phoneme level while preserving intelligibility. The method requires no accented training data and enables explicit phoneme-level accent manipulation. We design rule sets for Spanish- and Indian-accented English, modeling systematic differences in consonants, vowels, and syllable structure arising from phonotactic constraints. We analyze the trade-off between phoneme-level duration alignment and accent as realized in speech timing. Experimental results demonstrate effective accent shift while maintaining speech quality.

arXiv:2603.07551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) voice cloning poses severe privacy risks, demanding the removal of specific speaker identities from trained TTS models. Conventional machine unlearning is insufficient in this context, as zero-shot TTS can dynamically reconstruct voices from just reference prompts. We formalize this task as Speech Generation Speaker Poisoning (SGSP), in which we modify trained models to prevent the generation of specific identities while preserving utility for other speakers. We evaluate inference-time filtering and parameter-modification baselines across 1, 15, and 100 forgotten speakers. Performance is assessed through the trade-off between utility (WER) and privacy, quantified using AUC and Forget Speaker Similarity (FSSIM). We achieve strong privacy for up to 15 speakers but reveal scalability limits at 100 speakers due to increased identity overlap. Our study thus introduces a novel problem and evaluation framework toward further advances in generative voice privacy.

arXiv:2602.08104v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains, yet methods for interpretable failure detection and attribution remain underdeveloped. We introduce a two-stage gradient-based framework that provides interpretable diagnostics for three critical failure analysis tasks: (1) detecting the true initial failure source (Patient-0); (2) validating why non-attacked agents may be flagged first due to domino effects; and (3) tracing how failures propagate through learned coordination pathways. Stage 1 performs interpretable per-agent failure detection via Taylor-remainder analysis of policy-gradient costs, declaring an initial Patient-0 candidate at the first threshold crossing. Stage 2 provides validation through geometric analysis of critic derivatives-first-order sensitivity and directional second-order curvature aggregated over causal windows to construct interpretable contagion graphs. This approach explains "downstream-first" detection anomalies by revealing pathways that amplify upstream deviations. Evaluated across 500 episodes in Simple Spread (3 and 5 agents) and 100 episodes in StarCraft II using MADDPG and HATRPO, our method achieves 88.2-99.4% Patient-0 detection accuracy while providing interpretable geometric evidence for detection decisions. By moving beyond black-box detection to interpretable gradient-level forensics, this framework offers practical tools for diagnosing cascading failures in safety-critical MARL systems.