Low-Latency State Space Voice Activity Detection with Robust Onset Time Evaluation

Abstract

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) systems are commonly evaluated using metrics such as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), but these metrics do not account for temporal responsiveness. For low-latency applications, however, accurately measuring speech onset delay is essential. This is particularly challenging because onset latency evaluation is affected by noise and systematic misalignment in annotation timestamps. In this work, we introduce a probabilistic framework for evaluating VAD onset time under noisy temporal labels. We model annotated onset times as noisy observations of latent acoustic onsets and estimate the resulting discrepancy distribution from data. We show that this approach provides a more stable and robust estimate of algorithmic latency. In addition, we introduce S4VAD, the first state-space-model-based (SSM-based) VAD architecture. S4VAD supports efficient streaming inference while directly controlling the decay of past acoustic evidence, enabling fast and responsive speech-onset detection. We evaluate VAD onset latency across several low-latency architectures, including CNN, Transformer, and RNN models. Our proposed VAD achieves the lowest latency while maintaining a competitive AUROC.