Do Spoken Language Models Hear Speech as They Read Text? Bridging Structural Gaps Between Speech and Text
Spoken Language Models (SLMs) generate textual responses directly from speech, offering an alternative to cascaded systems. Despite recent advances, existing SLMs still exhibit weaker instruction-following behavior and limited generalization across diverse tasks compared to text-based language models. Our analysis shows that speech and text representations in current SLMs remain weakly aligned despite strong downstream performance, indicating that structural differences between continuous, temporally varying speech and discrete text remain insufficiently addressed. To address this, we propose a simple framework that decouples length mismatch from semantic alignment and encourages closer c...
| Authors | Hyeonyu Kim, Hwayeon Kim, Youngwon Choi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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