ParaGeo: Decomposing Paralinguistic Variation into a Shared Latent Geometry

Yuhan Liu, Yuxuan Ou, Ruoxi Su, Mohamed Ahmed Zaki, Yunbo Long

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.