From TOWER to SPIRE: Adding the Speech Modality to a Text-Only LLM

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10620v1
• Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:57:32 GMT
• Title: From TOWER to SPIRE: Adding the Speech Modality to a Text-Only LLM
• Authors: Kshitij Ambilduke, Ben Peters, Sonal Sannigrahi, Anil Keshwani, Tsz Kin Lam, Bruno Martins, Marcely Zanon Boito, André F. T. Martins,
• Abstract summary: We extend an existing large language model (LLMs) to the speech modality via speech discretization and continued pre-training.<n>The resulting open-source model, SPIRE, is able to transcribe and translate English speech input while maintaining TOWER's original performance on translation-related tasks.
• Score: 21.454870778985153
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance and generalization capabilities across multiple languages and tasks, making them very attractive targets for multi-modality integration (e.g., images or speech). In this work, we extend an existing LLM to the speech modality via speech discretization and continued pre-training. In particular, we are interested in multilingual LLMs, such as TOWER, as their pre-training setting allows us to treat discretized speech input as an additional translation language. The resulting open-source model, SPIRE, is able to transcribe and translate English speech input while maintaining TOWER's original performance on translation-related tasks, showcasing that discretized speech input integration as an additional language is feasible during LLM adaptation. We make our code and models available to the community.

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