Interleaved Speech Language Models Latently Work In Text
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
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.
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.
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.
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. 10029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models increasingly serve as the backbone of text-to-speech (TTS) systems, yet we understand little about the representations they build when text and generated speech tokens share a single residual stream.
arXiv:2609.10434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised speech foundation models are now used in a wide array of downstream applications, including traditional speech recognition and as the b...