MERaLiON-GR: Speech Gender Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04433v1
• Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:22:27 GMT
• Title: MERaLiON-GR: Speech Gender Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages
• Abstract summary: We present MERaLiON-GR, a speech gender recognition system.<n>It performs binary classification (female / male) on English and Southeast Asian languages.
• Score: 46.09005317642768
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We present MERaLiON-GR, a speech gender recognition system that performs binary classification (female / male) on English and Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. The model finetunes MERaLiON-SpeechEncoder-2, a large conformer based transformer pre-trained on a broad speech corpus, and applies parameter efficient fine-tuning via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to adapt the encoder to the gender recognition task, and appends a multi-scale ECAPA-TDNN down stream network with attention pooling and a lightweight linear classifier. Extensive evaluations across multilingual Singaporean and Southeast Asian languages (English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Khmer) show that MERaLiON-GR consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art gender recognition model Vox-Profile and a large Audio-LLM, in both full-utterance and segment level evaluation modes. The results underscore the value of dedicated speech models in achieving accurate paralinguistic understanding and strong cross-lingual generalization.

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