Text-aligned speech tokenization methods have emerged to better align speech tokens with LLM token spaces, enabling more effective utilization of pretrained LLMs. However, they rely on offline automat...
arXiv:2607. 06831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-text alignment means finding the temporal boundaries of each word in the audio.
arXiv:2506. 16738v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities.
arXiv:2602.19574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-language-model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems can generate natural speech, but most are not designed for low-latency dual-str...
arXiv:2609.14991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open Thai automatic speech recognition (ASR) is dominated by offline, Whisper-based models that read the whole utterance before transcribing, ruling ou...
The paper introduces Local Prototype Reconstruction (LPR), a lightweight regularizer that encourages bridge embeddings in speech‑to‑LLM systems to stay close to the frozen LLM’s input‑embedding neighbourhoods. By measuring lexical manifold compatibility with a fixed, head‑free, timestamp‑free diagnostic, the authors show that next‑word prediction and sentence‑level contrastive pretraining do not fully capture token‑level lexical compatibility. Experiments on multilingual ASR and speech translation demonstrate that LPR improves transfer, especially for translation and low‑resource adaptation, and that the diagnostic correlates with downstream gains across objectives.
Open Thai automatic speech recognition (ASR) is dominated by offline, Whisper-based models that read the whole utterance before transcribing, ruling out low-latency uses such as live captioning and vo...
The paper introduces AWED, a word‑level emission‑delay metric, and demonstrates that post‑training a delayed‑streaming model with a joint reward (GRPO) improves both accuracy and latency. Using a single operating point (τ=6 frames), the method outperforms both its supervised baseline and the Voxtral Realtime backbone across all lookahead budgets, reducing WER by up to 30.8% at 80 ms delay and lowering median AWED from 1.17 s to 1.04 s.
arXiv:2606. 09234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech (TTS) systems typically adopt a cascaded pipeline consisting of a speech tokenizer, an autoregressive large language model (LLM), and a diffusion based flow-matching (FM) model, with these components trained independently.
TokenMapper is a framework that enables direct translation between different speech tokenizers, allowing heterogeneous speech models to communicate without converting tokens to waveform audio. It handles mismatched token spaces, including single and multi-codebook representations, while maintaining a shared effective token rate. Experiments on GLM-4-Voice, MiMi, and DualCodec show that TokenMapper achieves word error rates close to native reconstructions, comparable human MOS scores, and significantly reduces latency compared to waveform bridging.
Uni-Stream is a unified streaming speech language model that supports both speech recognition and synthesis within a single architecture. Built on compact pretrained speech models, it processes interleaved text and speech in real time and achieves performance comparable to task‑specific models through a two‑stage training approach. The authors also introduce a data annotation pipeline for streaming training and plan to release the generated transcriptions and word‑level timestamps, while analyzing how speech and text representations occupy distinct latent spaces in the model.
The paper introduces a token‑level extension of Omni‑Temporal Classification (OTC) for automatic speech recognition, allowing unsupported tokens to be bypassed while preserving supervision for the rest of the word. Across 19 languages and three corpora, this token‑level OTC consistently outperforms standard CTC, achieving the lowest mean word error rate on every dataset and a 9.45% average relative WER reduction. A predictive‑entropy‑indexed schedule replaces epoch‑based relaxation, reducing training‑length dependence while maintaining performance.