arXiv:2609.17981v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-R...
By Mohan Shi, Zilai Wang, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Kaiyuan Zhang, Eray Eren, Abeer Alwan
arXiv:2609.23825v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present a comprehensive benchmark of Federated Learning (FL) for multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), evaluating four Speech-LLM archite...
By Jordi Luque, Aleix Sant, Fernando L\'opez
FireRedAudio is a 9‑billion‑parameter audio language model that separates continuous input representations for audio understanding and speech generation, enabling a single autoregressive LLM to perform tasks such as ASR, zero‑shot TTS, Instruct TTS, and semantic/acoustic speech editing. The model uses a dedicated Audio Encoder for recognition and a RedAE‑based pathway for generation, with the LLM directly generating text or conditioning a flow‑matching DiT to produce acoustic latents. Evaluations show competitive or leading performance in multilingual ASR, content‑accurate zero‑shot TTS, strong instruction following, and significant improvements in speech editing over prior work.
By Feiyu Shen, Fenglong Xie, Junjie Li, Kun Xie, Lei Xie, Xu Tang, Xuelong Geng, Yan Jia, Yao Hu, Yichen Han, Yichen Wu, Ziqi Dai, Junjie Chen, Kai Huang, Manzhen Wei, Yixuan Li
UniAE-MoE is a unified audio encoder that uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to model cross‑domain audio representations. It integrates encoder components from Qwen2‑Audio and Audio‑Flamingo 3, enhances them with SwiGLU and shared experts, and applies a two‑stage instruction‑tuning strategy along with task‑specific data scaling. The model achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on the XARES‑LLM benchmark (0.802) and tops the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, demonstrating strong generalization across speech, music, and general audio tasks.
By Shengbo Cai, Zhisheng Zhang, Zichao Nie, Jing Peng, Jingran Xie, Zhiyong Wu
Connecting a pre-trained speech encoder to a Large Language Model (LLM) is the standard architecture for building Speech LLMs. However, a structural misalignment exists between the encoder and the LLM.
Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), have shown strong Automatic Sp...
The paper introduces Training-Free Omni (TFO), a plug‑and‑play framework that transforms a frozen vision‑language model (VLM) into a speech‑centric omni model without modifying its architecture or requiring multimodal re‑alignment. TFO leverages Whisper to generate confidence‑filtered, timestamped transcripts and routes them through the VLM’s existing language interface, leaving the visual pathway untouched. Evaluations on 56 benchmarks across 21 languages show that TFO matches or surpasses native omni models on audio‑visual tasks, improves audio‑only performance, and preserves strong visual and reasoning capabilities.
By Ankan Deria, Hanoona Rasheed, Xilin He, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan
arXiv:2607. 05196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech.
By Zhifeng Kong, Sang-gil Lee, Jaehyeon Kim, Boxin Wang, Zihan Liu, Sungwon Kim, Yang Chen, Arushi Goel, Rajarshi Roy, Wenliang Dai, Zhuolin Yang, Yangyi Chen, Dongfu Jiang, Sreyan Ghosh, Tuomas Rintamaki, Andrew Tao, Jonathan Raiman, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping
The paper introduces a symbiotic architecture that equips large language models with audio‑understanding abilities without fine‑tuning their weights. It uses an injector module to write audio‑conditioned vectors into the LLM’s key‑value cache, allowing the model to act as an audio language model while keeping the backbone unchanged. The approach improves scalability—since injection cost depends on the injector width—and preserves the LLM’s original text performance, outperforming conventional frozen‑LLM methods and approaching fine‑tuned ALM results on audio tasks.
By Yotaro Kubo, Qi Sun, Yujin Tang
Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unified audio-text LLM built on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM.
arXiv:2508. 05149v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in handling spoken inputs for high-resource languages, reaching state-of-the-art performance in various tasks.
By Seraphina Fong, Marco Matassoni, Alessio Brutti
The paper introduces Hybrid Search, a method that refines warm-initialized large language model (LLM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by exploiting interactions between ASR hidden states and the base LLM’s hidden states. By identifying tokens with high semantic dependence and selectively correcting them, the approach surpasses traditional global LLM‑correction techniques such as rescoring and late fusion. The study demonstrates that even after warm initialization, LLM‑based ASR models can further benefit from their base LLM during inference.
By Chan-Jan Hsu, Jaeyeon Kim, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe, Hung-yi Lee, Carlos Busso