Existing Speech Language Model (SLM) scaling analysis paints a bleak picture. They predict that SLMs require much more compute and data
compared to text, leading some to question the feasibility of training high-quality SLMs. However, modern SLMs are often initialised from
pre-trained TextLMs using speech-text interleaving to allow knowledge transfer. This raises the question - Do interleaved SLMs scale more efficiently than textless-SLMs?
In this paper we answer a resounding yes! We conduct scaling analysis of interleaved SLMs by training several dozen and analysing the
scaling trends. We see that under this setup SLMs scale more efficiently with compute. Additionally, our results indicate that the
scaling-dynamics are significantly different than textless-SLMs, suggesting one should allocate notably more of the compute budget for
increasing model size over training tokens. We also study the role of synthetic data and TextLM model families in unlocking this potential.
Results suggest, that our scaled up model achieves comparable performance with leading models on speech semantic metrics while using less
compute and data than other approaches.
Model Card for Model ID
This is a Speech Language Model (SLM) trained for generating speech or text continuations over discrete Hubert tokens given speech-text prompts.
This base SpeechLM can be used to generate continuations for speech segments, or cross-modal e.g generate a text contiuation to a speech prompt, or as a base for further tuning. See the SlamKitcodebase for more details on usage, and checkout the demo page for some generation examples
Out-of-Scope Use
This model was trained on diverse speech datasets, as such the outputs should not be treated as factual in any way.
How to Get Started with the Model
We refer users to the official repository for full usage explanations - github.
Training Details
We highly encourage users to read the full paper, for full training details.
Compute Infrastructure
Hardware
This model was trained using 8 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Software
The model was trained using the SlamKit codebase which builds upon 🤗transformers extending it to support
easy and efficient training of Speech Language Models.
Citation
BibTeX:
@misc{maimon2025scaling,
title={Scaling Analysis of Interleaved Speech-Text Language Models},
author={Gallil Maimon and Michael Hassid and Amit Roth and Yossi Adi},
year={2025},
eprint={2504.02398},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02398},
}