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Review regressions before expanding the test." ], "measure": "Successful outcomes, response time, human rework, and total cost per successful task.", "decision": "Keep the change only if it meets your preselected quality and latency limits and improves the metric you care about after setup and operating costs. Otherwise retain the baseline. This is an exploration plan, not a validated recommendation." }, "builder_review": null, "arxiv_id": "2609.21145", "title": "Scaling Forced Alignment to End-User Devices", "summary": "The method replaces quadratic-time-and-space Viterbi forced alignment (as in torchaudio) with a Hirschberg-based in-place variant plus constrained-random-walk search-space pruning, enabling alignment of multi-hour audio on CPU-class hardware. The cost is implementation complexity beyond a standard Viterbi decoder and reliance on an existing acoustic model to supply frame-level emissions; the alignment quality itself is unchanged without pruning. 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