# Paralinguistics-Aware Speech-Empowered Large Language Models for Natural Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [WavChat: A Survey of Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13577/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03751/) (2024)
- [Style-Talker: Finetuning Audio Language Model and Style-Based Text-to-Speech Model for Fast Spoken Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11849/) (2024)
- [Contextual Paralinguistic Data Creation for Multi-Modal Speech-LLM: Data Condensation and Spoken QA Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13338/) (2025)
- [ProsodyLM: Uncovering the Emerging Prosody Processing Capabilities in Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20091/) (2025)
- [Incorporating Contextual Paralinguistic Understanding in Large Speech-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07273/) (2025)
- [Steer-MoE: Efficient Audio-Language Alignment with a Mixture-of-Experts Steering Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13558/) (2025)
- [Still Between Us? Evaluating and Improving Voice Assistant Robustness to Third-Party Interruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17358/) (2026)
- [TESU-LLM: Training Speech-LLMs Without Speech via Unified Encoder Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06343/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Speech Large Language Models through Reinforced Behavior Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03526/) (2025)
- [TAVID: Text-Driven Audio-Visual Interactive Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20296/) (2025)
- [From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16472/) (2026)
- [MERaLiON-SER: Robust Speech Emotion Recognition Model for English and SEA Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04914/) (2025)
- [IRAF: Interference-Resilient Adaptive Fusion for Noise-Robust End-to-End Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06559/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work shows promising results in expanding the capabilities of large language models (LLM) to directly understand and synthesize speech. However, an LLM-based strategy for modeling spoken dialogs remains elusive, calling for further investigation. This paper introduces an extensive speech-text LLM framework, the Unified Spoken Dialog Model (USDM), designed to generate coherent spoken responses with naturally occurring prosodic features relevant to the given input speech without relying on explicit automatic speech recognition (ASR) or text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We have verified the inclusion of prosody in speech tokens that predominantly contain semantic information and have used this foundation to construct a prosody-infused speech-text model. Additionally, we propose a generalized speech-text pretraining scheme that enhances the capture of cross-modal semantics. To construct USDM, we fine-tune our speech-text model on spoken dialog data using a multi-step spoken dialog template that stimulates the chain-of-reasoning capabilities exhibited by the underlying LLM. Automatic and human evaluations on the DailyTalk dataset demonstrate that our approach effectively generates natural-sounding spoken responses, surpassing previous and cascaded baselines. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/usdm.