# SALMONN-omni: A Standalone Speech LLM without Codec Injection for Full-duplex Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17060/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10759/) (2024)
- [SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11000/) (2023)
- [SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13289/) (2023)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02152/) (2022)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice 2: Scalable Streaming Speech Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10117/) (2024)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Kimi-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18425/) (2025)
- [Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16725/) (2024)
- [Listen, Think, and Understand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10790/) (2023)
- [Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.04808/) (2015)
- [VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17196/) (2024)
- [VITA-1.5: Towards GPT-4o Level Real-Time Vision and Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01957/) (2025)
- [A Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05869/) (2015)
- [LLaMA-Omni: Seamless Speech Interaction with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06666/) (2024)
- [Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00774/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [FLEXI: Benchmarking Full-duplex Human-LLM Speech Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22243/) (2025)
- [Game-Time: Evaluating Temporal Dynamics in Spoken Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26388/) (2025)
- [MoshiRAG: Asynchronous Knowledge Retrieval for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12928/) (2026)
- [Multi-Faceted Interactivity Alignment in Full-Duplex Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11167/) (2026)
- [Asynchronous Reasoning: Training-Free Interactive Thinking LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10931/) (2025)
- [The Silent Thought: Modeling Internal Cognition in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models via Latent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17837/) (2026)
- [End-to-end Listen, Look, Speak and Act](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16756/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06540/) (2026)
- [M3-SLU: Evaluating Speaker-Attributed Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19358/) (2025)
- [NemotronLabs VoiceChat: An Open Full-duplex Speech-to-Speech Model with Tool Calling Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21967/) (2026)
- [Same Words, Different Actions: Paired Turn-Taking Evaluation under Rewritten Dialogue Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17360/) (2026)
- [Dual-Axis Generative Reward Model Toward Semantic and Turn-taking Robustness in Interactive Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14920/) (2026)
- [From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16472/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Perturbation Selection for Contrastive Audio Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00247/) (2026)
- [DuplexGen: Adaptive Synthesis of Human-AI Turn-Taking Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26178/) (2026)
- [Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17605/) (2026)
- [Noise Adaptive Streaming Audio-Visual Speech Token Enhancement for Robust Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08390/) (2026)
- [SALMONN-duo: Adaptive Dual-System Coordination for Full-Duplex Voice Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34247/) (2026)
- [MultiTalk: Scaling Full-Duplex Speech Models to Long, Multi-Party, Bilingual Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36903/) (2026)
- [How Should LLMs Listen While Speaking? A Study of User-Stream Routing in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10199/) (2026)
- [EchoDistill: Robust Large Audio Language Models via Noisy-to-Clean Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23954/) (2026)
- [IRAF: Interference-Resilient Adaptive Fusion for Noise-Robust End-to-End Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06559/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Speech-Centric Omni Understanding with Frozen VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04242/) (2026)
- [A Harness for Synthesizing Diverse Naturalistic Full-Duplex Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28806/) (2026)
- [LLMs are General Asynchronous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35427/) (2026)
- [PERSIST: Who-What-When Memory Across Sessions for Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07725/) (2026)
- [People Making Conversation: Evaluating How Naturally Speech Models Converse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12802/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In order to enable fluid and natural human-machine speech interaction, existing full-duplex conversational systems often adopt modular architectures with auxiliary components such as voice activity detectors, interrupters, conversation state predictors, or multiple LLMs. These systems, however, suffer from error accumulation across modules and struggle with key challenges such as context-dependent barge-in and echo cancellation. Recent approaches, most notably Moshi, simplify the pipeline by injecting audio codecs into the token space of a single LLM. However, such methods still incur significant performance degradation when operating on the speech rather than text modality. In this paper, we introduce SALMONN-omni, the first single, standalone full-duplex speech LLM that operates without audio codecs in its token space. It features a novel dynamic thinking mechanism within the LLM backbone, enabling the model to learn when to transition between speaking and listening states. Experiments on widely used benchmarks for spoken question answering and open-domain dialogue show that SALMONN-omni achieves at least 30% relative performance improvement over existing open-source full-duplex models and performs highly competitively to half-duplex and turn-based systems, despite using substantially less training data. Moreover, SALMONN-omni demonstrates strong performance in complex conversational scenarios, including turn-taking, backchanneling, echo cancellation and context-dependent barge-in, with further improvements achieved through reinforcement learning. Some demo conversations between user and SALMONN-omni are provided in the following repository https://github.com/bytedance/SALMONN.