Researchers on the Institute of Computing Expertise, Chinese language Academy of Sciences, have launched LLaMA-Omni2, a household of speech-capable giant language fashions (SpeechLMs) now obtainable on Hugging Face. This analysis introduces a modular framework that permits real-time spoken dialogue by integrating speech notion and synthesis with language understanding. In contrast to earlier cascaded techniques, LLaMA-Omni2 operates in an end-to-end pipeline whereas retaining modular interpretability and low coaching price.
Overview of the LLaMA-Omni2 Structure
LLaMA-Omni2 encompasses fashions starting from 0.5B to 14B parameters, every constructed atop the Qwen2.5-Instruct collection. The structure consists of:
- Speech Encoder: Makes use of Whisper-large-v3 to remodel enter speech into token-level acoustic representations.
- Speech Adapter: Processes encoder outputs utilizing a downsampling layer and a feed-forward community to align with the language mannequin’s enter area.
- Core LLM: The Qwen2.5 fashions function the primary reasoning engine.
- Streaming TTS Decoder: Converts LLM outputs into speech tokens utilizing an autoregressive Transformer after which generates mel spectrograms by a causal movement matching mannequin impressed by CosyVoice2.
A gating mechanism fuses LLM hidden states with textual embeddings earlier than speech synthesis, enhancing contextual constancy within the generated audio.
Streaming Era with Learn-Write Scheduling
The mannequin adopts a read-write technique to facilitate streaming output. Particularly, for each R tokens produced by the LLM, W speech tokens are generated. This permits synchronized textual and acoustic era, minimizing latency with out compromising fluency.
Empirical findings recommend that setting R = 3 and W = 10 offers a good trade-off between latency (~583 ms), alignment (ASR-WER: 3.26), and perceptual high quality (UTMOS: 4.19).
Coaching Strategy
Regardless of attaining aggressive efficiency, LLaMA-Omni2 is skilled on a comparatively compact corpus—200K multi-turn speech-to-speech dialogue samples. These samples are synthesized from instruction-following textual content datasets (Alpaca, UltraChat), with various enter voices and a constant output voice generated utilizing FishSpeech and CosyVoice2 fashions.
Coaching is executed in two levels:
- Stage I: Independently optimizes the speech-to-text and text-to-speech modules.
- Stage II: Fantastic-tunes the speech-to-speech era path, together with the gating and autoregressive decoding parts.
Benchmark Outcomes
The fashions are evaluated on spoken query answering and speech instruction following duties utilizing each speech-to-text (S2T) and speech-to-speech (S2S) modes.
| Mannequin | Llama Q (S2S) | Net Q (S2S) | GPT-4o Rating | ASR-WER | Latency (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-4-Voice (9B) | 50.7 | 15.9 | 4.09 | 3.48 | 1562.8 |
| LLaMA-Omni (8B) | 49.0 | 23.7 | 3.52 | 3.67 | 346.7 |
| LLaMA-Omni2-7B | 60.7 | 31.3 | 4.15 | 3.26 | 582.9 |
The efficiency scales persistently with mannequin dimension. Notably, LLaMA-Omni2-14B outperforms all baselines throughout duties, even with considerably much less coaching information than native SpeechLMs equivalent to GLM-4-Voice.
Part Analyses
- Gate Fusion Module: Eradicating the gating mechanism will increase ASR-WER and reduces speech high quality, confirming its function in aligning textual and contextual alerts.
- TTS Pretraining: Initializing the TTS mannequin from Qwen2.5 and fine-tuning in a streaming setup yields one of the best efficiency. Coaching from scratch fails to converge successfully.
- Learn/Write Methods: Adjusting the R:W ratio impacts latency and high quality. Bigger W improves UTMOS however at the price of response delay.
Moreover, the research demonstrates that multi-turn dialogue information is simpler than single-turn information in coaching speech interplay capabilities, and that efficiency plateaus round 200K samples.
Conclusion
LLaMA-Omni2 demonstrates that high-quality, low-latency spoken interplay with LLMs is possible with out the necessity for in depth pretraining on large speech corpora. By combining modular structure with autoregressive streaming synthesis, the system gives a sensible pathway for real-time speech functions.
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