Soundwave: Less is More for Speech-Text Alignment in LLMs

🤗 Upvotes: 65 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SD

Authors:
Yuhao Zhang, Zhiheng Liu, Fan Bu, Ruiyu Zhang, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li

Title:
Soundwave: Less is More for Speech-Text Alignment in LLMs

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12900v1

Abstract:
Existing end-to-end speech large language models (LLMs) usually rely on large-scale annotated data for training, while data-efficient training has not been discussed in depth. We focus on two fundamental problems between speech and text: the representation space gap and sequence length inconsistency. We propose Soundwave, which utilizes an efficient training strategy and a novel architecture to address these issues. Results show that Soundwave outperforms the advanced Qwen2-Audio in speech translation and AIR-Bench speech tasks, using only one-fiftieth of the training data. Further analysis shows that Soundwave still retains its intelligence during conversation. The project is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Soundwave.