SpeechAlign: Aligning Speech Generation to Human Preferences

Speech language models have significantly advanced in generating realistic speech, with neural codec language models standing out. However, the integration of human feedback to align speech outputs to human preferences is often neglected. This paper addresses this gap by first analyzing the distribution gap in codec language models, highlighting how it leads to discrepancies between the training and inference phases, which negatively affects performance. Then we explore leveraging learning from human feedback to bridge the distribution gap. We introduce SpeechAlign, an iterative self-improvement strategy that aligns speech language models to human preferences. SpeechAlign involves constructing a preference codec dataset contrasting golden codec tokens against synthetic tokens, followed by preference optimization to improve the codec language model. This cycle of improvement is carried out iteratively to steadily convert weak models to strong ones. Through both subjective and objective evaluations, we show that SpeechAlign can bridge the distribution gap and facilitating continuous self-improvement of the speech language model. Moreover, SpeechAlign exhibits robust generalization capabilities and works for smaller models. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/0nutation/SpeechGPT.

Calibrating the Confidence of Large Language Models by Eliciting Fidelity

Large language models optimized with techniques like RLHF have achieved good alignment in being helpful and harmless. However, post-alignment, these language models often exhibit overconfidence, where the expressed confidence does not accurately calibrate with their correctness rate. In this paper, we decompose the language model confidence into the \textit{Uncertainty} about the question and the \textit{Fidelity} to the answer generated by language models. Then, we propose a plug-and-play method to estimate the confidence of language models. Our method has shown good calibration performance by conducting experiments with 6 RLHF-LMs on four MCQA datasets. Moreover, we propose two novel metrics, IPR and CE, to evaluate the calibration of the model, and we have conducted a detailed discussion on \textit{Truly Well-Calibrated Confidence}. Our method could serve as a strong baseline, and we hope that this work will provide some insights into the model confidence calibration.

SpeechGPT-Gen: Scaling Chain-of-Information Speech Generation

Benefiting from effective speech modeling, current Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in in-context speech generation and efficient generalization to unseen speakers. However, the prevailing information modeling process is encumbered by certain redundancies, leading to inefficiencies in speech generation. We propose Chain-of-Information Generation (CoIG), a method for decoupling semantic and perceptual information in large-scale speech generation. Building on this, we develop SpeechGPT-Gen, an 8-billion-parameter SLLM efficient in semantic and perceptual information modeling. It comprises an autoregressive model based on LLM for semantic information modeling and a non-autoregressive model employing flow matching for perceptual information modeling. Additionally, we introduce the novel approach of infusing semantic information into the prior distribution to enhance the efficiency of flow matching. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SpeechGPT-Gen markedly excels in zero-shot text-to-speech, zero-shot voice conversion, and speech-to-speech dialogue, underscoring CoIG's remarkable proficiency in capturing and modeling speech's semantic and perceptual dimensions. Code and models are available at https://github.com/0nutation/SpeechGPT.

SpeechAgents: Human-Communication Simulation with Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Systems

Human communication is a complex and diverse process that not only involves multiple factors such as language, commonsense, and cultural backgrounds but also requires the participation of multimodal information, such as speech. Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated promising performance in simulating human society. Can we leverage LLM-based multi-agent systems to simulate human communication? However, current LLM-based multi-agent systems mainly rely on text as the primary medium. In this paper, we propose SpeechAgents, a multi-modal LLM based multi-agent system designed for simulating human communication. SpeechAgents utilizes multi-modal LLM as the control center for individual agent and employes multi-modal signals as the medium for exchanged messages among agents. Additionally, we propose Multi-Agent Tuning to enhance the multi-agent capabilities of LLM without compromising general abilities. To strengthen and evaluate the effectiveness of human communication simulation, we build the Human-Communication Simulation Benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that SpeechAgents can simulate human communication dialogues with consistent content, authentic rhythm, and rich emotions and demonstrate excellent scalability even with up to 25 agents, which can apply to tasks such as drama creation and audio novels generation. Code and models will be open-sourced at https://github. com/0nutation/SpeechAgents

SpeechTokenizer: Unified Speech Tokenizer for Speech Large Language Models

Current speech large language models build upon discrete speech representations, which can be categorized into semantic tokens and acoustic tokens. However, existing speech tokens are not specifically designed for speech language modeling. To assess the suitability of speech tokens for building speech language models, we established the first benchmark, SLMTokBench. Our results indicate that neither semantic nor acoustic tokens are ideal for this purpose. Therefore, we propose SpeechTokenizer, a unified speech tokenizer for speech large language models. SpeechTokenizer adopts the Encoder-Decoder architecture with residual vector quantization (RVQ). Unifying semantic and acoustic tokens, SpeechTokenizer disentangles different aspects of speech information hierarchically across different RVQ layers. Furthermore, We construct a Unified Speech Language Model (USLM) leveraging SpeechTokenizer. Experiments show that SpeechTokenizer performs comparably to EnCodec in speech reconstruction and demonstrates strong performance on the SLMTokBench benchmark. Also, USLM outperforms VALL-E in zero-shot Text-to-Speech tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ZhangXInFD/SpeechTokenizer/.

PromptNER: A Prompting Method for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via k Nearest Neighbor Search

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a task aiming to identify named entities via limited annotated samples. Recently, prototypical networks have shown promising performance in few-shot NER. Most of prototypical networks will utilize the entities from the support set to construct label prototypes and use the query set to compute span-level similarities and optimize these label prototype representations. However, these methods are usually unsuitable for fine-tuning in the target domain, where only the support set is available. In this paper, we propose PromptNER: a novel prompting method for few-shot NER via k nearest neighbor search. We use prompts that contains entity category information to construct label prototypes, which enables our model to fine-tune with only the support set. Our approach achieves excellent transfer learning ability, and extensive experiments on the Few-NERD and CrossNER datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities

Multi-modal large language models are regarded as a crucial step towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and have garnered significant interest with the emergence of ChatGPT. However, current speech-language models typically adopt the cascade paradigm, preventing inter-modal knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose SpeechGPT, a large language model with intrinsic cross-modal conversational abilities, capable of perceiving and generating multi-model content. With discrete speech representations, we first construct SpeechInstruct, a large-scale cross-modal speech instruction dataset. Additionally, we employ a three-stage training strategy that includes modality-adaptation pre-training, cross-modal instruction fine-tuning, and chain-of-modality instruction fine-tuning. The experimental results demonstrate that SpeechGPT has an impressive capacity to follow multi-modal human instructions and highlight the potential of handling multiple modalities with one model. Demos are shown in https://0nutation.github.io/SpeechGPT.github.io/.

DUB: Discrete Unit Back-translation for Speech Translation

How can speech-to-text translation (ST) perform as well as machine translation (MT)? The key point is to bridge the modality gap between speech and text so that useful MT techniques can be applied to ST. Recently, the approach of representing speech with unsupervised discrete units yields a new way to ease the modality problem. This motivates us to propose Discrete Unit Back-translation (DUB) to answer two questions: (1) Is it better to represent speech with discrete units than with continuous features in direct ST? (2) How much benefit can useful MT techniques bring to ST? With DUB, the back-translation technique can successfully be applied on direct ST and obtains an average boost of 5.5 BLEU on MuST-C En-De/Fr/Es. In the low-resource language scenario, our method achieves comparable performance to existing methods that rely on large-scale external data. Code and models are available at https://github.com/0nutation/DUB.

A Relation-Oriented Clustering Method for Open Relation Extraction

The clustering-based unsupervised relation discovery method has gradually become one of the important methods of open relation extraction (OpenRE). However, high-dimensional vectors can encode complex linguistic information which leads to the problem that the derived clusters cannot explicitly align with the relational semantic classes. In this work, we propose a relation-oriented clustering model and use it to identify the novel relations in the unlabeled data. Specifically, to enable the model to learn to cluster relational data, our method leverages the readily available labeled data of pre-defined relations to learn a relation-oriented representation. We minimize distance between the instance with same relation by gathering the instances towards their corresponding relation centroids to form a cluster structure, so that the learned representation is cluster-friendly. To reduce the clustering bias on predefined classes, we optimize the model by minimizing a joint objective on both labeled and unlabeled data. Experimental results show that our method reduces the error rate by 29.2% and 15.7%, on two datasets respectively, compared with current SOTA methods.

SENT: Sentence-level Distant Relation Extraction via Negative Training

Distant supervision for relation extraction provides uniform bag labels for each sentence inside the bag, while accurate sentence labels are important for downstream applications that need the exact relation type. Directly using bag labels for sentence-level training will introduce much noise, thus severely degrading performance. In this work, we propose the use of negative training (NT), in which a model is trained using complementary labels regarding that ``the instance does not belong to these complementary labels". Since the probability of selecting a true label as a complementary label is low, NT provides less noisy information. Furthermore, the model trained with NT is able to separate the noisy data from the training data. Based on NT, we propose a sentence-level framework, SENT, for distant relation extraction. SENT not only filters the noisy data to construct a cleaner dataset, but also performs a re-labeling process to transform the noisy data into useful training data, thus further benefiting the model's performance. Experimental results show the significant improvement of the proposed method over previous methods on sentence-level evaluation and de-noise effect.