Challenge: Text-based language models outperform character-based models, but speech inputs are 20ms or 40ms-long discrete units.
Approach: They propose a generative language model based on word-size continuous audio tokens . they replace lookup table for lexical types with a Lexical Embedding function .
Outcome: The proposed model is five times more memory efficient than discrete unit GSLMs and is phonetically and semantically interpretable.

Similar Papers

Evaluating Text-to-Speech Synthesis from a Large Discrete Token-based Speech Language Model (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in generative language modeling applied to discrete speech tokens presented a new avenue for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis.
Approach: They propose to use generative language modeling to generate text-to-speech (TTS) outputs by a discrete token-based model.
Outcome: The proposed model is rated higher in naturalness and context appropriateness in listening tests compared to a conventional TTS.
On Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio (2021.tacl-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using a set of metrics to evaluate the learned representations, we aim to create a system that learns from natural interactions as infants learn their first language.
Approach: They propose a task of learning acoustic and linguistic characteristics from raw audio and a set of metrics to evaluate the learned representations at acustic, linguistic and encoding levels.
Outcome: The proposed models evaluate the learned representations at acoustic and linguistic levels for both encoding and generation.
Efficient Training for Cross-lingual Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Currently, large language models (LLMs) focus on the text modality, making speech modeling difficult.
Approach: They propose a cross-lingual speech language model that trains on discrete speech tokens to achieve cross-modal and cross-linguistic alignment through continual pre-training.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment through continual pre-training.
Text-Free Prosody-Aware Generative Spoken Language Modeling (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experimental results show that generative spoken language models (LMs) are natural unsupervised multitask learners.
Approach: They propose a prosody-aware generative spoken language model that uses discovered units to generate natural, meaningful, and coherent speech.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate natural, meaningful, and coherent speech given a spoken prompt.
Continuous Speech Tokenizer in Text To Speech (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Autoregressive modeling is a common method for processing language sequences and is effective in token prediction.
Approach: They propose a text-to-speech model based on continuous speech tokens and a continuous tokenizer for speech compression.
Outcome: The proposed model has better continuity and higher estimated Mean Opinion Scores (MoS) this is attributed to better information preservation rate across low and high frequencies in the frequency domain.
Generative Pre-trained Speech Language Model with Efficient Hierarchical Transformer (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experimental results indicate that GPST significantly outperforms the existing speech language models in terms of word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical transformer that quantizes audio waveforms into two distinct types of discrete speech representations and integrates them within a transformer architecture.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing speech language models in word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity.
Language-Codec: Bridging Discrete Codec Representations and Speech Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing gaps between discrete acoustic codecs and downstream speech language models . initial channel of codebooks contains excessive information, making it difficult to generate tokens from weakly supervised signals such as text.
Approach: They propose a discrete acoustic codec for generating acustic tokens from weakly supervised signals.
Outcome: The proposed language-codec outperforms competing audio compression algorithms and validates on downstream speech language models.
Speech Discrete Tokens or Continuous Features? A Comparative Analysis for Spoken Language Understanding in SpeechLLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) have emerged as dominant speech processing approaches.
Approach: They compare self-supervised learning-based discrete and continuous features . they compare performance across six spoken language understanding-related tasks .
Outcome: The proposed models outperform discrete tokens and continuous features in six spoken language understanding-related tasks.
Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling (2023.tacl-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: dGSLM is the first “textless” model able to generate audio samples of naturalistic spoken dialogues.
Approach: They propose a model that generates speech, laughter, and other paralinguistic signals in two channels simultaneously and reproduces more naturalistic turn taking compared to a text-based cascaded model.
Outcome: The proposed model reproduces more naturalistic and fluid turn taking than a text-based cascaded model.
Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Survey (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising solution for end-to-end speech interaction.
Approach: They propose to build a framework that allows users to input text and translate it into speech . they propose to use a text-only LLM and a "textto-speech" framework to generate a response based on this transcription .
Outcome: The survey offers an overview of recent approaches to building SpeechLMs . it outlines core architectural components, training methodologies, evaluation strategies and challenges .

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations