DAMOS: Learning Distortion-Aware Speech Quality Assessment through Explicit Distortion Localization

Abstract: Automatic speech quality assessment aims to predict Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) consistent with human subjective perception and is essential for evaluating speech generation, enhancement, and communication systems. For speech signals, especially synthetic speech, distortions often occur locally, and overall perceptual quality is usually dominated by a small number of perceptually salient distortion regions. However, most existing methods are primarily optimized with utterance-level MOS, which provides only coarse-grained supervision and offer no explicit indication of where perceptually important distortions occur. To address this limitation, we introduce explicit distortion localization as auxiliary knowledge for speech quality assessment. We construct the first partially distorted speech dataset with frame-level distortion annotations and train a localization model to generate distortion cues. Building on these cues, we propose DAMOS, a distortion-aware speech quality assessment framework that integrates localization information into the MOS prediction pipeline. Experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that DAMOS consistently outperforms existing methods and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization, validating the effectiveness of explicit distortion localization for speech quality assessment.