Covo-Audio Technical Report

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09823v1
• Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:31:11 GMT
• Title: Covo-Audio Technical Report
• Authors: Wenfu Wang, Chenxing Li, Liqiang Zhang, Yiyang Zhao, Yuxiang Zou, Hanzhao Li, Mingyu Cui, Hao Zhang, Kun Wei, Le Xu, Zikang Huang, Jiajun Xu, Jiliang Hu, Xiang He, Zeyu Xie, Jiawen Kang, Youjun Chen, Meng Yu, Dong Yu, Rilin Chen, Linlin Di, Shulin Feng, Na Hu, Yang Liu, Bang Wang, Shan Yang,
• Abstract summary: Covo-Audio, a 7B-end LALM, directly processes continuous audio inputs and generates audio outputs within a single unified architecture.<n>Covo-Audio-Chat, a dialogue-oriented variant, demonstrates semantic strong spoken conversational abilities.
• Score: 61.09708870154148
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In this work, we present Covo-Audio, a 7B-parameter end-to-end LALM that directly processes continuous audio inputs and generates audio outputs within a single unified architecture. Through large-scale curated pretraining and targeted post-training, Covo-Audio achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance among models of comparable scale across a broad spectrum of tasks, including speech-text modeling, spoken dialogue, speech understanding, audio understanding, and full-duplex voice interaction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the pretrained foundation model exhibits strong speech-text comprehension and semantic reasoning capabilities on multiple benchmarks, outperforming representative open-source models of comparable scale. Furthermore, Covo-Audio-Chat, the dialogue-oriented variant, demonstrates strong spoken conversational abilities, including understanding, contextual reasoning, instruction following, and generating contextually appropriate and empathetic responses, validating its applicability to real-world conversational assistant scenarios. Covo-Audio-Chat-FD, the evolved full-duplex model, achieves substantially superior performance on both spoken dialogue capabilities and full-duplex interaction behaviors, demonstrating its competence in practical robustness. To mitigate the high cost of deploying end-to-end LALMs for natural conversational systems, we propose an intelligence-speaker decoupling strategy that separates dialogue intelligence from voice rendering, enabling flexible voice customization with minimal text-to-speech (TTS) data while preserving dialogue performance. Overall, our results highlight the strong potential of 7B-scale models to integrate sophisticated audio intelligence with high-level semantic reasoning, and suggest a scalable path toward more capable and versatile LALMs.

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