Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio
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Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce Generative Spoken Language Modeling, the task of learning the acoustic and linguistic characteristics of a language from raw audio (no text, no labels), and a set of metrics to automatically evaluate the learned representations at acoustic and linguistic levels for both encoding and generation. We set up baseline systems consisting of a discrete speech encoder (returning pseudo-text units), a generative language model (trained on pseudo-text), and a speech decoder (generating a waveform from pseudo-text) all trained without supervision and validate the proposed metrics with human evaluation. Across 3 speech encoders (CPC, wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT), we find that the number of discrete units (50, 100, or 200) matters in a task-dependent and encoder-dependent way, and that some combinations approach text-based systems.
Key facts. Cited by 340 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 55 of its 79 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2021.
Builds on
55 of 79 references.
References · 55
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50 most cited of 55 All 55 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 18; 2022: 44; 2023: 78; 2024: 84; 2025: 75; 2026: 41.
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- 2026Controllable Accent Normalization via Discrete Diffusion15 Mar 2026
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- 2022AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generationcited by 616
- 2024Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialoguecited by 568
- 2023Simple and Controllable Music Generationcited by 488
- 2023Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scalecited by 379
- 2023AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listencited by 343
- 2022AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generationcited by 295
- 2022Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Reviewcited by 260
- 2021Speech Resynthesis from Discrete Disentangled Self-Supervised Representationscited by 243
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- 2021SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processingcited by 180
12 most cited of 295 All 295 (JSON)
- 2026Estimating Surprisal from the Speech Signal13 Oct 2026
- 2026Training a Compact, Strong, and Realistic Text-to-Speech Model10 Oct 2026
- 2026GS-Codec: A Gaussian-Splatting Bottleneck for Neural Audio Coding3 Oct 2026
- 2026Language Discrimination Improves Linguistic Learning in Multilingual Speech Models27 Sep 2026
- 2026Quantifying the Generation Modality Gap in Speech-Text Language Models13 Sep 2026
- 2026TokenMapper: A Step Toward Interoperable Speech Token Translation11 Sep 2026
- 2026StreamAlign: Streaming Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization9 Sep 2026
- 2026Benchmarking_Fast_Domain_Adaptation_for_Unsupervised_Speech_Units27 Aug 2026
- 2026Do Spoken Language Models Hear Speech as They Read Text? Bridging Structural Gaps Between Speech and Text24 Aug 2026
- 2026Speaker-Disentangled Chunk-Wise Regression for Syllabic Tokenization5 Jul 2026
- 2026TokAN: Accent Normalization Using Self-Supervised Speech Tokens4 Jul 2026
- 2026On the Effect of Segmentation Width and Cluster Size on Speech Resynthesis and Continuation in Generative Spoken Language Models22 Jun 2026
12 newest of 295 All 295 (JSON)