Prompt Amplification and Zero-Shot Late Fusion in Audio-Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition

ArXi:2603.23057v1 Announce Type: cross Audio-Language Models (ALMs) are making strides in understanding speech and non-speech audio. However, domain-specialist Foundation Models (FMs) remain the best for closed-ended speech processing tasks such as Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). Using ALMs for Zero-shot SER is a popular choice, but their potential to work with specialists to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance remains unexplored. We propose ZS-Fuse, a late-fusion method that combines zero-shot emotion estimates from a dual-encoder ALM with specialist FMs.