# ParaGeo: Decomposing Paralinguistic Variation into a Shared Latent Geometry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03125/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06681/) (2023)
- [Steering Language Models With Activation Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10248/) (2023)
- [The Linear Representation Hypothesis and the Geometry of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03658/) (2023)
- [Designing and Interpreting Probes with Control Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03368/) (2019)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Null It Out: Guarding Protected Attributes by Iterative Nullspace Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07667/) (2020)
- [LEACE: Perfect linear concept erasure in closed form](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03819/) (2023)
- [Style Tokens: Unsupervised Style Modeling, Control and Transfer in End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09017/) (2018)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Towards End-to-End Prosody Transfer for Expressive Speech Synthesis with Tacotron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09047/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Speech Decomposition via Triple Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11284/) (2020)
- [EmoSteer-TTS: Fine-Grained and Training-Free Emotion-Controllable Text-to-Speech via Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03543/) (2025)
- [CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03420/) (2026)
- [EmoShift: Lightweight Activation Steering for Enhanced Emotion-Aware Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22873/) (2026)
- [Improving Causal Interventions in Amnesic Probing with Mean Projection or LEACE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11673/) (2025)
- [Beyond Global Emotion: Fine-Grained Emotional Speech Synthesis with Dynamic Word-Level Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20378/) (2025)
- [Task Vector in TTS: Toward Emotionally Expressive Dialectal Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18699/) (2025)
- [A Geometric Perspective on Composable Emotion Steering in Text-to-Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00946/) (2026)
- [DisCo-Speech: Controllable Zero-Shot Speech Generation with A Disentangled Speech Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13251/) (2025)
- [SpeechParaling-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Paralinguistic-Aware Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20842/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech delivery varies with both the requested paralinguistic attribute and the linguistic content. We introduce ParaGeo, a matched-content decomposition of paralinguistic variation in a frozen speech language model. Synthesized audio tokens are replayed with a fixed listening prompt; pooled key/value (K/V) representations are centered and projected into a shared low-dimensional space. Our GLM-4-Voice probe spans 80 requested controls from 12 benchmark families across eight sentences. With a globally fitted calibration basis, content-held-out centroid accuracy using this basis is 9.49% versus a 1.25% permutation baseline; same-label cross-content cosine similarity is 0.285 versus 0.017, and both conditional permutation tests yield p = 0.001. A separate ten-scenario, six-style probe reveals reproducible contrast directions across scenarios. Static, additive, and temporal interventions produce attribute-, layer-, and schedule-dependent response profiles. These results provide a shared coordinate representation for measuring paralinguistic structure and an empirical starting point for latent speech control. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhanlydia/ParaGeo.