Loud and Clear: Dynamic Activation Steering for Improving Speech Intelligibility in Noisy Environments

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.07647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech becomes less intelligible in noisy environments, and humans naturally adapt their voice to compensate. Inspired by this behavior, we investigate whether a text-to-speech (TTS) model can be guided to produce more intelligible speech using activation steering, without retraining. We focus on two characteristics of the Lombard effect: increased vocal effort and hyper-articulation. We introduce a prompt-relative steering mechanism that prevent