Related papers: Spirit LM: Interleaved Spoken and Written Language…

Auto-regressive speech-text models pre-trained on interleaved text tokens and discretized speech tokens demonstrate strong speech understanding and generation, yet remain substantially less compute-efficient than text LLMs, partly due to…

In Spoken language understanding (SLU), a natural solution is concatenating pre-trained speech models (e.g. HuBERT) and pretrained language models (PLM, e.g. T5). Most previous works use pretrained language models with subword-based…

Speech language models (SpeechLMs) process and generate acoustic data only, without textual supervision. In this work, we propose TWIST, a method for training SpeechLMs using a warm-start from a pretrained textual language models. We show…

Collecting sufficient labeled data for spoken language understanding (SLU) is expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies achieved promising results by using pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by this, we aim to ask:…

Speech-aware language models (LMs) have demonstrated capabilities in understanding spoken language while generating text-based responses. However, enabling them to produce speech output efficiently and effectively remains a challenge. In…

Existing Speech Language Model (SLM) scaling analysis paints a bleak picture. It predicts that SLMs require much more compute and data compared to text, leading some to question the feasibility of training high-quality SLMs. However, modern…

Textless spoken language models (SLMs) are generative models of speech that do not rely on text supervision. Most textless SLMs learn to predict the next semantic token, a discrete representation of linguistic content, and rely on a…

Language model pre-training has shown promising results in various downstream tasks. In this context, we introduce a cross-modal pre-trained language model, called Speech-Text BERT (ST-BERT), to tackle end-to-end spoken language…

With the growing influence of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in integrating speech representations with them to enable more seamless multi-modal processing and speech understanding. This study introduces a novel…

A new language model for speech recognition is presented. The model develops hidden hierarchical syntactic-like structure incrementally and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus complementing the locality of…

Recently, ``textless" speech language models (SLMs) based on speech units have made huge progress in generating naturalistic speech, including non-verbal vocalizations. However, the generated speech samples often lack semantic coherence. In…

Recent work shows promising results in expanding the capabilities of large language models (LLM) to directly understand and synthesize speech. However, an LLM-based strategy for modeling spoken dialogs remains elusive, calling for further…

This paper introduces Interleaved Speech-Text Language Model (IST-LM) for zero-shot streaming Text-to-Speech (TTS). Unlike many previous approaches, IST-LM is directly trained on interleaved sequences of text and speech tokens with a fixed…

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred interest in expanding their application beyond text-based tasks. A large number of studies have explored integrating other modalities with LLMs, notably speech modality, which…

Dialogue serves as the most natural manner of human-computer interaction (HCI). Recent advancements in speech language models (SLM) have significantly enhanced speech-based conversational AI. However, these models are limited to turn-based…

Speech tokenization serves as the foundation of speech language model (LM), enabling them to perform various tasks such as spoken language modeling, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, etc. Most speech tokenizers are trained independently of…

In the traditional cascading architecture for spoken language understanding (SLU), it has been observed that automatic speech recognition errors could be detrimental to the performance of natural language understanding. End-to-end (E2E) SLU…

Prompting has become a practical method for utilizing pre-trained language models (LMs). This approach offers several advantages. It allows an LM to adapt to new tasks with minimal training and parameter updates, thus achieving efficiency…

Recent advances in end-to-end spoken language models (SLMs) have significantly improved the ability of AI systems to engage in natural spoken interactions. However, most existing models treat speech merely as a vehicle for linguistic…