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.
arXiv:2606. 07080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present dots.
arXiv:2512. 20978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Model (LM)-based generative modeling has emerged as a promising direction for TSE, offering potential for improved generalization and high-fidelity speech.
arXiv:2606. 11386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Full-duplex spoken language models (FD-SLMs) enable seamless speech interaction by allowing models to listen and speak simultaneously, yet the internal mechanism by which they coordinate listening and speaking remains underexplored.
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. 10368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-text (S2T) systems for recognition (ASR) and translation (S2TT) typically generate discrete text tokens.
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: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.
The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.
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.
GEPARD is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that uses a standard large language model backbone to generate speech autoregressively, decoding audio with an FSQ‑based neural codec. It streams audio chunk‑by‑chunk as text arrives, achieving a real‑time factor of about 0.067 and an aggregate speedup of roughly 204× on a single GPU with 256 concurrent streams. The design keeps all complex auxiliary mechanisms outside the decode loop, enabling deployment with a standard LLM engine (vLLM) without kernel modifications.
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...