arXiv AI

Fast Speech Foundation Model Distillation Using Interleaved Stacking

arXiv:2606. 11766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distilling a large speech foundation model (SFM) into an efficient student model has been successfully applied to low-resource environments.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

CAL-MOS: Bridging Layers with Adapters for Robust MOS Prediction Across Speech Foundation Models

arXiv:2609.14956v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech Quality Assessment (SQA) is essential for modern speech technologies, and recent non-intrusive SQA predictors increasingly rely on Speech Foun...

By Alef Iury Siqueira Ferreira, Pedro Lustosa Rege Botelho, Fernanda Silva, Daniel Casanova, Rafael Faustino, Frederico Oliveira, Arlindo Galv\~ao Filho, Anderson da Silva Soares
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

RT-SEMamba: Real-Time Speech Enhancement Mamba via Progressive Knowledge Distillation

RT-SEMamba is a fully causal speech enhancement model that uses causal time‑frequency Mamba blocks instead of Transformer‑based architectures, allowing efficient long‑form inference with a fixed‑size recurrent state. The authors introduce a progressive knowledge distillation strategy that compresses an 8‑layer teacher into a single‑layer student by jointly distilling spectral outputs and intermediate representations. On the Voicebank‑DEMAND benchmark, the 8‑layer model achieves 3.32 PESQ under a 25 ms latency constraint, while the distilled 1‑layer student improves from 3.06 to 3.18 PESQ, maintains the same steady‑state real‑time factor, and runs 2.64× faster than the teacher.

By Rong Chao, Sung-Feng Huang, Moreno La Quatra, Sabato Marco Siniscalchi, Wen-Huang Cheng, Szu-Wei Fu, Yu Tsao
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Effective Distillation to Hybrid xLSTM Architectures

arXiv:2603. 15590v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There have been numerous attempts to distill quadratic attention-based large language models (LLMs) into sub-quadratic linearized architectures.

By Lukas Hauzenberger, Niklas Schmidinger, Thomas Schmied, Anamaria-Roberta Hartl, David Stap, Pieter-Jan Hoedt, Maximilian Beck, Sebastian B\"ock, G\"unter Klambauer, Sepp Hochreiter
arXiv AI
Jun 15

X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs

arXiv:2603. 24596v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts.

By Di Cao, Dongjie Fu, Hai Yu, Siqi Zheng, Xu Tan, Tao Jin