The paper investigates how Spoken Language Models (SLMs) process speech compared to text, noting that current SLMs show weak alignment between speech and text representations despite strong downstream performance. The authors propose a framework that separates length mismatch from semantic alignment to better match speech and text representations. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that this approach yields competitive results against strong baselines, highlighting the need to explicitly address structural differences between speech and text in SLM training.
arXiv:2606.22473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech language models (SLMs) increasingly combine speech and text, often by interleaving their tokens within a single sequence. Yet how thes...
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.
arXiv:2607. 06831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-text alignment means finding the temporal boundaries of each word in the audio.
arXiv:2609.15313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive generation of interleaved text and acoustic tokens is a common approach to spoken-response generation in speech large language models....
arXiv:2610.08063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents the HINTT system submitted to the 2nd Challenge and Workshop on Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model (MLC-SLM). We a...
arXiv:2609.14743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure speech language models often lag behind text and speech-text language models in generating coherent content, but this gap is difficult to quantify...
arXiv:2610.08085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-LLMs often exhibit prompt overfitting, where models solely trained on automatic speech recognition (ASR) instruction fail to generalize to new i...
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:2606. 03957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data.
arXiv:2609.09719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-aligned speech tokenization methods have emerged to better align speech tokens with LLM token spaces, enabling more effective utilization of pretr...
The paper introduces a method called randomized intermediate guidance for training tandem speech-to-speech models, where a large language model (LLM) acts as a backend providing candidate responses while the user is speaking. Instead of simulating the backend’s guidance, the approach derives guidance directly from the conversation corpus, using target responses for informative guidance and randomly sampled responses to simulate irrelevant updates. Experiments on synthetic dialogues and 3.8k hours of real conversations show that this technique yields response quality comparable to LLM-generated baselines while improving natural turn‑taking and audio‑judge naturalness.
arXiv:2609.22452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context understanding remains a fundamental challenge for large language models, as excessively long inputs often lead models to forget salient in...