# MOSS-Speech: Towards True Speech-to-Speech Models Without Text Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00499/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [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)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CMMLU: Measuring massive multitask language understanding in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09212/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02152/) (2022)
- [Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01192/) (2021)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16725/) (2024)
- [Paraformer: Fast and Accurate Parallel Transformer for Non-autoregressive End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08317/) (2022)
- [Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00774/) (2024)
- [Powerset multi-class cross entropy loss for neural speaker diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13025/) (2023)
- [WebQA: Multihop and Multimodal QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00590/) (2021)
- [Textually Pretrained Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13009/) (2023)
- [Spoken Question Answering and Speech Continuation Using Spectrogram-Powered LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15255/) (2023)
- [SpeechTokenizer: Unified Speech Tokenizer for Speech Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16692/) (2023)
- [Llasa: Scaling Train-Time and Inference-Time Compute for Llama-based Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04128/) (2025)
- [Scaling Speech-Text Pre-training with Synthetic Interleaved Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17607/) (2024)
- [Huatuo-26M, a Large-scale Chinese Medical QA Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01526/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Ming-Flash-Omni: A Sparse, Unified Architecture for Multimodal Perception and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24821/) (2025)
- [Efficient Chain-of-Modality Reasoning via Progressive Compression for Spoken Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19932/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Real-Time Voice Agents: From Component Quality to Grounded Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30798/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spoken dialogue systems often rely on cascaded pipelines that transcribe, process, and resynthesize speech. While effective, this design discards paralinguistic cues and limits expressivity. Recent end-to-end methods reduce latency and better preserve these cues, yet still rely on text intermediates, creating a fundamental bottleneck. We present MOSS-Speech, a true speech-to-speech large language model that directly understands and generates speech without relying on text guidance. Our approach combines a modality-based layer-splitting architecture with a frozen pre-training strategy, preserving the reasoning and knowledge of pretrained text LLMs while adding native speech capabilities. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results in spoken question answering and delivers comparable speech-to-speech performance relative to existing text-guided systems, while still maintaining competitive text performance. By narrowing the gap between text-guided and direct speech generation, our work establishes a new paradigm for expressive and efficient end-to-end speech interaction.