Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streaming
Reviewed by Pith T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 kernel pith:N5NXAVR4record.jsonopen to challenge →
read the original abstract
Recent advances in language models have achieved significant progress. GPT-4o, as a new milestone, has enabled real-time conversations with humans, demonstrating near-human natural fluency. Such human-computer interaction necessitates models with the capability to perform reasoning directly with the audio modality and generate output in streaming. However, this remains beyond the reach of current academic models, as they typically depend on extra TTS systems for speech synthesis, resulting in undesirable latency. This paper introduces the Mini-Omni, an audio-based end-to-end conversational model, capable of real-time speech interaction. To achieve this capability, we propose a text-instructed speech generation method, along with batch-parallel strategies during inference to further boost the performance. Our method also helps to retain the original model's language capabilities with minimal degradation, enabling other works to establish real-time interaction capabilities. We call this training method "Any Model Can Talk". We also introduce the VoiceAssistant-400K dataset to fine-tune models optimized for speech output. To our best knowledge, Mini-Omni is the first fully end-to-end, open-source model for real-time speech interaction, offering valuable potential for future research.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 39 Pith papers
-
Unlocking Speech-Text Compositional Powers: Instruction-Following Speech Language Models without Instruction Tuning
SpeechCombine produces instruction-following SLMs via speech pre-training followed by direct weight combination with the text LLM instruction delta, without any speech instruction tuning.
-
Interleaved Speech Language Models Latently Work In Text
Interleaved SLMs implicitly transcribe spoken words to text tokens in middle layers (top candidate for 77% of data) before predicting in text space and returning to speech.
-
A Survey of Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems: Architectural Hierarchy, Interaction Ontology, and Decision State Machine
A survey proposing an L0-L3 architectural hierarchy, T×I×R interaction ontology, and IDLE/LISTEN/SPEAK/WAIT/DUAL decision state machine for full-duplex spoken dialogue systems, documenting a realization gap between ar...
-
Overcoming State Inertia in Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models via Activation Steering
FD-SLMs exhibit state inertia during abrupt interruptions that a training-free perception-vector steering intervention mitigates, lifting correctness from 28% to 45% and IWOR from 40% to 72% on the Zero-Buffer Benchmark.
-
PolySpeech-100: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across 100+ Languages and Dialects
PolySpeech-100 is a new benchmark for native-level speech comprehension across 110 linguistic variants that evaluates 22 models and reports E2E advantages on dialects, robustness gaps on low-resource languages, and de...
-
DuplexSLA: A Full-Duplex Spoken Language Model with Synchronized Speech, Language, and Action
DuplexSLA introduces a three-channel full-duplex architecture that synchronizes continuous user audio, discrete assistant audio, and rate-limited textual actions inside a single backbone for native turn-taking and in-...
-
VITA-QinYu: Expressive Spoken Language Model for Role-Playing and Singing
VITA-QinYu is the first expressive end-to-end spoken language model supporting role-playing and singing alongside conversation, trained on 15.8K hours of data and outperforming prior models on expressiveness and conve...
-
Minimizing Modality Gap from the Input Side: Your Speech LLM Can Be a Prosody-Aware Text LLM
TextPro-SLM minimizes the speech-text modality gap from the input side via a prosody-aware unified encoder, delivering the lowest gap and strong performance at 3B/7B scales with only ~1000 hours of audio.
-
Hijacking Large Audio-Language Models via Context-Agnostic and Imperceptible Auditory Prompt Injection
AudioHijack generates imperceptible adversarial audio via gradient estimation, attention supervision, and reverberation blending to hijack 13 LALMs with 79-96% success on unseen contexts and real commercial agents.
-
Audio Flamingo 3: Advancing Audio Intelligence with Fully Open Large Audio Language Models
Audio Flamingo 3 introduces an open large audio-language model achieving new state-of-the-art results on over 20 audio understanding and reasoning benchmarks using a unified encoder and curriculum training on open data.
-
VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistants
VoiceBench is the first benchmark for multi-faceted evaluation of LLM voice assistants using real and synthetic spoken instructions with speaker, environmental, and content variations.
-
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs
Lychee-FD resolves modality interference in full-duplex spoken language models by separating acoustic and semantic parameters in deep layers and adding a dense semantic alignment channel, achieving state-of-the-art pe...
-
SPEARBench: A Benchmark for Naturalness Evaluation in Streaming Speech-to-Speech Language Models
An open-source benchmark for speech-to-speech models shows that current systems produce intelligible audio but diverge from human conversational behavior in latency, dialect consistency, emotional entrainment, and prosody.
-
TurnNat: Automatic Evaluation of Turn-Taking Naturalness in Dyadic Spoken Dialogue
TurnNat introduces a likelihood-based automatic evaluation method for turn-taking naturalness in dyadic spoken dialogues using a causal prediction model and a human-validated perturbation benchmark.
-
Preserving Speech-to-Text LLM Capabilities in Speech-to-Speech Generation
PRIME-Speech adds low-latency speech output to frozen S2T LLMs by synchronizing a causal post-decoder with intermediate hidden states and using mixed conditioning plus turn-level KV-cache packing, preserving original ...
-
TRADE: Transducer-Augmented Decoder for Speech LLM
TRADE augments multimodal Speech LLMs with a transducer branch for streaming ASR, reporting 6.71% WER offline and 8.40% streaming on the Open ASR Leaderboard from one checkpoint.
-
Learning When to Think While Listening in Large Audio-Language Models
A wait-think-answer controller for LALMs is trained via SFT followed by six-reward DAPO, raising row-weighted accuracy from 67.6% to 70.3% and cutting post-endpoint thinking length by 14% on synthetic spoken QA while ...
-
MiniMind-O Technical Report: An Open Small-Scale Speech-Native Omni Model
MiniMind-O delivers a working 0.1B-scale open omni model with speech-native output, Thinker-Talker split, frozen encoders, and full release of code, checkpoints, and training data.
-
GRM: Utility-Aware Jailbreak Attacks on Audio LLMs via Gradient-Ratio Masking
GRM ranks Mel bands by attack contribution versus utility sensitivity, perturbs a subset, and learns a universal perturbation to reach 88.46% average jailbreak success rate with improved attack-utility trade-off on fo...
-
FastTurn: Unifying Acoustic and Streaming Semantic Cues for Low-Latency and Robust Turn Detection
FastTurn unifies acoustic features and streaming CTC decoding for low-latency, robust turn detection in full-duplex dialogue systems and releases a realistic human-dialogue test set.
-
StableToken: A Noise-Robust Semantic Speech Tokenizer for Resilient SpeechLLMs
StableToken introduces a multi-branch architecture with bit-wise voting to create noise-robust semantic speech tokens, achieving lower Unit Edit Distance and better SpeechLLM robustness than prior single-path tokenizers.
-
Step-Audio 2 Technical Report
Step-Audio 2 integrates a latent audio encoder, reasoning-centric reinforcement learning, and discrete audio token generation into language modeling to deliver state-of-the-art performance on audio understanding and c...
-
Step-Audio: Unified Understanding and Generation in Intelligent Speech Interaction
Step-Audio introduces a 130B-parameter unified speech-text model with open-sourced components for understanding, generation, affordable voice cloning, and dynamic control, claiming SOTA human evaluation results on a n...
-
GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot
GLM-4-Voice builds an end-to-end spoken chatbot by deriving a 175bps single-codebook tokenizer from ASR, synthesizing interleaved speech-text data, and continuing pre-training of GLM-4-9B on up to 1 trillion tokens be...
-
Streaming T5-based Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Limited Lookahead
S5-TTS introduces a streaming T5-TTS variant with lookahead-causal masking and interleaved multi-source distillation that achieves comparable quality to full-context models while cutting end-to-end latency.
-
Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents
ModeratorLM conditions a streaming speech LLM on assigned roles for adaptive turn-taking in multi-party settings, reporting over 40% higher precision and 70% higher recall than non-role baselines on real meetings and ...
-
Which Speech Representation Better Matches Text-Native Reasoning? A Study of Speech-Text Alignment on Frame Rate and Representation
Empirical sweep finds 4.17 Hz frame rate plus intermediate-layer alignment optimal for speech QA under frozen text LLM backbone.
-
Sympatheia: Emotionally Adaptive Voice Assistant with Continuous Affect Conditioning
Sympatheia introduces a continuous affect-conditioned speech dialogue model and the Sympatheia-18k synthetic dataset, showing improved emotional appropriateness over baselines when speech cues are limited.
-
DuplexSLA: A Full-Duplex Spoken Language Model with Synchronized Speech, Language, and Action
DuplexSLA is a dual-stream three-channel full-duplex model that synchronizes continuous user audio, discrete assistant audio, and rate-limited action text for native turn-taking and in-conversation tool calling.
-
A Survey of Large Audio Language Models: Generalization, Trustworthiness, and Outlook
A survey of Large Audio Language Models that establishes a taxonomy of trustworthiness vulnerabilities and proposes a Defense-in-Depth roadmap for audio intelligence.
-
Minimizing Modality Gap from the Input Side: Your Speech LLM Can Be a Prosody-Aware Text LLM
TextPro-SLM reduces the speech-text modality gap by feeding an LLM backbone with synchronized text tokens and prosody embeddings from WhisperPro, achieving lowest gap scores at 3B/7B scales with roughly 1,000 hours of audio.
-
Kimi-Audio Technical Report
Kimi-Audio is an open-source audio foundation model that achieves state-of-the-art results on speech recognition, audio understanding, question answering, and conversation after pre-training on more than 13 million ho...
-
Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report
Qwen2.5-Omni presents a multimodal model with block-wise encoders, TMRoPE position embeddings, and a Thinker-Talker architecture that enables simultaneous text and streaming speech generation while matching text perfo...
-
Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents
ModeratorLM conditions a chunk-wise streaming speech LLM on assigned roles (with optional CoT) to raise turn-taking precision over 40% and recall over 70% versus non-role baselines on synthetic RolePlayConv data and r...
-
MOSS-Audio Technical Report
MOSS-Audio is an audio-language model using a 12.5 Hz encoder, DeepStack cross-layer injection, time markers, and an event-preserving annotation pipeline for unified audio understanding.
-
PASK: Toward Intent-Aware Proactive Agents with Long-Term Memory
PASK introduces the DD-MM-PAS paradigm for streaming proactive agents with intent-aware detection, hybrid memory modeling, and a new real-world benchmark where the IntentFlow model matches top LLMs on latency while fi...
-
From Objectives to Applications: Aligning Architectural Biases in Audio Self-Supervised Learning
A survey that organizes audio SSL into five objective paradigms, relates their demands to architectural biases, and interprets downstream applications as tests of generalization.
-
A Survey of Audio Reasoning in Multimodal Foundation Models
A survey that provides a unified formulation of audio reasoning and reviews advances across Audio-to-Text, Audio-to-Speech, Audio-Visual, and Agentic paradigms while discussing challenges and future directions.
-
Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey
The paper provides the first comprehensive survey of multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning, including foundational concepts, a taxonomy of methodologies, application analyses, challenges, and future directions.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.