arXiv AI

Acoustic-to-Text KV Compression for Full-Duplex Speech Models

The paper introduces acoustic-to-text KV compression for full‑duplex speech models, converting acoustic key‑value states into compact textual memory during listening‑time slack. When the KV cache exceeds a target budget, older acoustic states are evicted while transcripts and recent acoustic context are retained. Experiments on ten‑minute LongSpeech sessions show a 64.6% reduction in peak streaming KV‑cache size and improved transcription, temporal question answering, and summarization, with comparable pause‑handling, turn‑taking, and interruption performance in Full‑Duplex‑Bench.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Liberating LLM Capabilities in Full-Duplex Speech Models

arXiv:2606. 07547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-based large language models are typically constrained to spoken replies, which limits their user-facing outputs to what can be verbalized and suppresses text-native capabilities such as code generation, structured analysis, and multi-step reasoning in realtime interaction, for tasks that require persistent, structured, and inspectable intermediate outputs.

By Luoyuan Zhang, Bokai Xu, Junbo Cui, Weiyue Sun, Yingjing Xu, Hanyu Liu, Yuan Yao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Enabling Streaming User Transcription in Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech Models

The paper introduces a lightweight ASR head that can be added to full‑duplex speech‑to‑speech models, enabling real‑time user transcription without major architectural changes. The method adds only a few parameters and preserves full‑duplex conversational features such as turn‑taking and barge‑in. Experiments show a streaming WER of 10.21% within the duplex framework and 7.73% when trained as a standalone ASR model, matching state‑of‑the‑art performance.

By Ke Hu, Nourchene Ferchichi, Edresson Casanova, Ankita Pasad, Elena Rastorgueva, Chen Chen, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Piotr Zelasko, Yifan Peng, Hainan Xu, Zhehuai Chen, Boris Ginsburg
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

SPAR-K: Scheduled Periodic Alternating Early Exit for Spoken Language Models

SPAR-K is a scheduled periodic alternating early‑exit framework for interleaved spoken language models that reduces decoding depth for speech tokens while maintaining quality. It lets most speech positions exit at a fixed intermediate layer and inserts periodic full‑depth refresh steps to counter distribution shift. Experiments on Step‑Audio‑2‑mini and GLM‑4‑Voice show up to 11 % depth reduction with less than 0.82 % drop in question‑answering accuracy and negligible impact on MOS and WER.

By Hsiao-Ying Huang, Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-yi Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 10

X2Streaming-ASR: wait when uncertain, emit when ready for streaming ASR

X2Streaming-ASR introduces a method for streaming automatic speech recognition that separates the decision of when to commit a transcript from what to commit. The approach uses a three‑stage training process: first establishing streaming capability, then warm‑starting a commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refining the policy with character‑level, segment‑assigned group‑relative rewards for accuracy and latency. On AISHELL‑1/2/3 and WenetSpeech datasets, the system achieves mean character‑level commit latencies of 27–84 ms, far lower than baseline systems, while also attaining the best streaming character error rates on AISHELL‑1 and AISHELL‑3.

By Zhiwei Lin, Kaiqi Fu, Rime Wen, Zehan Liu, Shawn Qin, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 21

NemotronLabs VoiceChat: An Open Full-duplex Speech-to-Speech Model with Tool Calling Capabilities

arXiv:2609.21967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce NemotronLabs VoiceChat, an open full-duplex speech-to-speech model with native tool-calling capabilities. NemotronLabs VoiceChat combine...

By Jagadeesh Balam, Travis Bartley, Edresson Casanova, Sanjay Chauhan, Chen Chen, Zhehuai Chen, Zijia Chen, Francesco Ciannella, Slyne Deng, Mikyas Desta, Harishchandra Dubey, Slim Essid, Nourchene Ferchichi, Boris Ginsburg, Mariana Graterol Fuenmayor, Negar Habibi, Kevin Hu, Anand Joseph, Viraj Karandikar, Myungjong Kim, Viacheslav Klimkov, Seelan Lakshmi Narasimhan, Lily Lee, Jason Li, Eileen Long, Ameya Mahabaleshwarkar, Aditya Malte, Adi Margolin, Sasha Meister, Valentin Mendelev, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Ankita Pasad, Yifan Peng, Elena Rastorgueva, Jayda Ritchie, Jason Roche, Nikhil Srihari, Yuanhang Su, Yoshi Suhara, Viet Anh Trinh, Jinhan Wang, Piotr Zelasko, Hui Wang, Puhui Meng, Chaosen Zhang, Yunsheng Liu, Shawn Wang, Wenjing Li, Zhonglei He
arXiv AI
Sep 12

X-AuT: Progressive Audio-Encoder Compression for Speech LLMs with Cross-Scale Distillation

X-AuT is a progressive framework for compressing the audio encoder of speech large language models. It selects layer combinations via short behavioral probes and restores performance through representation alignment, cross‑scale distillation, scheduled student‑policy supervision, and LoRA finetuning, while keeping the language‑model backbone frozen. On ten Chinese–English benchmarks, reducing Qwen3‑ASR‑0.6B’s encoder from 18 to 16 layers lowers macro‑average error from 5.61% to 5.27%, and a 14‑layer model achieves 5.75% error with 20.7% fewer parameters.

By Haojun Zhang, Yi Zou, Min Chen, Qize Yu, Lianrui Fan, Xini Ding, Hao Li, Shuchang Zhou, Xianming Liu, Shiyu Huang