# DeSTA: Enhancing Speech Language Models through Descriptive Speech-Text Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18871 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18871/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10792/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13289/) (2023)
- [Zephyr: Direct Distillation of LM Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16944/) (2023)
- [AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12995/) (2023)
- [NeMo: a toolkit for building AI applications using Neural Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09577/) (2019)
- [Pengi: An Audio Language Model for Audio Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11834/) (2023)
- [Listen, Think, and Understand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10790/) (2023)
- [Audio Flamingo: A Novel Audio Language Model with Few-Shot Learning and Dialogue Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01831/) (2024)
- [On decoder-only architecture for speech-to-text and large language model integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03917/) (2023)
- [ImageBind-LLM: Multi-modality Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03905/) (2023)
- [PromptTTS: Controllable Text-to-Speech with Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12171/) (2022)
- [Dynamic-SUPERB: Towards A Dynamic, Collaborative, and Comprehensive Instruction-Tuning Benchmark for Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09510/) (2023)
- [Joint Audio and Speech Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14405/) (2023)
- [Music Understanding LLaMA: Advancing Text-to-Music Generation with Question Answering and Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11276/) (2023)
- [SLM: Bridge the thin gap between speech and text foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00230/) (2023)
- [LLaSM: Large Language and Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15930/) (2023)
- [COSMIC: Data Efficient Instruction-tuning For Speech In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02248/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [On The Landscape of Spoken Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08528/) (2025)
- [DeSTA2.5-Audio: Toward General-Purpose Large Audio Language Model with Self-Generated Cross-Modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02768/) (2025)
- [DeSTA2: Developing Instruction-Following Speech Language Model Without Speech Instruction-Tuning Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20007/) (2024)
- [Towards Holistic Evaluation of Large Audio-Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15957/) (2025)
- [Can Large Audio-Language Models Truly Hear? Tackling Hallucinations with Multi-Task Assessment and Stepwise Audio Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16130/) (2024)
- [Speech-Copilot: Leveraging Large Language Models for Speech Processing via Task Decomposition, Modularization, and Program Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09886/) (2024)
- [Speech-IFEval: Evaluating Instruction-Following and Quantifying Catastrophic Forgetting in Speech-Aware Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19037/) (2025)
- [Salmon: A Suite for Acoustic Language Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07437/) (2024)
- [Reducing Object Hallucination in Large Audio-Language Models via Audio-Aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07233/) (2025)
- [AudioLens: A Closer Look at Auditory Attribute Perception of Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05140/) (2025)
- [Teaching Audio-Aware Large Language Models What Does Not Hear: Mitigating Hallucinations through Synthesized Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14518/) (2025)
- [Analyzing Mitigation Strategies for Catastrophic Forgetting in End-to-End Training of Spoken Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17496/) (2025)
- [When Large Language Models Meet Speech: A Survey on Integration Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19548/) (2025)
- [MERaLiON-AudioLLM: Bridging Audio and Language with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09818/) (2024)
- [All That Glitters Is Not Audio: Rethinking Text Priors and Audio Reliance in Audio-Language Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24401/) (2026)
- [From Alignment to Advancement: Bootstrapping Audio-Language Alignment with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20166/) (2025)
- [SpeechCaps: Advancing Instruction-Based Universal Speech Models with Multi-Talker Speaking Style Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13891/) (2024)
- [Steering Language Model to Stable Speech Emotion Recognition via Contextual Perception and Chain of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18186/) (2025)
- [Incorporating Contextual Paralinguistic Understanding in Large Speech-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07273/) (2025)
- [LiSTEN: Learning Soft Token Embeddings for Neural Audio LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18517/) (2025)
- [Towards Reliable Large Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19294/) (2025)
- [AHAMask: Reliable Task Specification for Large Audio Language Models without Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01787/) (2025)
- [Audio-Maestro: Enhancing Large Audio-Language Models with Tool-Augmented Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11454/) (2025)
- [ISA-Bench: Benchmarking Instruction Sensitivity for Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23558/) (2025)
- [ASPIRin: Action Space Projection for Interactivity-Optimized Reinforcement Learning in Full-Duplex Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10065/) (2026)
- [How Auditory Knowledge in LLM Backbones Shapes Audio Language Models: A Holistic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19195/) (2026)
- [CAAD: Contrastive Audio-Aware Distillation for Efficient Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23052/) (2026)
- [Investigating the Viability of Employing Multi-modal Large Language Models in the Context of Audio Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00777/) (2026)
- [ALARM: Audio-Language Alignment for Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09556/) (2026)
- [Quantifying the Generation Modality Gap in Speech-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14743/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent speech language models (SLMs) typically incorporate pre-trained speech models to extend the capabilities from large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a Descriptive Speech-Text Alignment approach that leverages speech captioning to bridge the gap between speech and text modalities, enabling SLMs to interpret and generate comprehensive natural language descriptions, thereby facilitating the capability to understand both linguistic and non-linguistic features in speech. Enhanced with the proposed approach, our model demonstrates superior performance on the Dynamic-SUPERB benchmark, particularly in generalizing to unseen tasks. Moreover, we discover that the aligned model exhibits a zero-shot instruction-following capability without explicit speech instruction tuning. These findings highlight the potential to reshape instruction-following SLMs by incorporating rich, descriptive speech captions.