Paper · arXiv 2402.05755
SpiRit-LM: Interleaved Spoken and Written Language Model
Tu Anh Nguyen, Benjamin Muller, Bokai Yu, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Maha Elbayad, Sravya Popuri, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Robin Algayres, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Itai Gat, Gabriel Synnaeve, Juan Pino, Benoit Sagot, Emmanuel Dupoux
A foundation multimodal language model combines text and speech using speech and text units, supporting semantic and expressive capabilities and few-shot learning across tasks.
Abstract
We introduce SPIRIT-LM, a foundation multimodal language model that freely mixes text and speech. Our model is based on a pretrained text language model that we extend to the speech modality by continuously training it on text and speech units. Speech and text sequences are concatenated as a single set of tokens, and trained with a word-level interleaving method using a small automatically-curated speech-text parallel corpus. SPIRIT-LM comes in two versions: a BASE version that uses speech semantic units and an EXPRESSIVE version that models expressivity using pitch and style units in addition to the semantic units. For both versions, the text is encoded with subword BPE tokens. The resulting model displays both the semantic abilities of text models and the expressive abilities of speech models. Additionally, we demonstrate that SPIRIT-LM is able to learn new tasks in a few-shot fashion across modalities (i.e. ASR, TTS, Speech Classification).