We introduce Slam, a recipe for training high-quality Speech Language Models (SLMs) on a single academic GPU in 24 hours. We do so through empirical analysis of model initialisation and architecture, synthetic training data, preference optimisation with synthetic data and tweaking all other components. We empirically demonstrate that this training recipe also scales well with more compute getting results on par with leading SLMs in a fraction of the compute cost. We hope these insights will make SLM training and research more accessible. In the context of SLM scaling laws, our results far outperform predicted compute optimal performance, giving an optimistic view to SLM feasibility. See code, data, models, samples at - https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/slamming .
Model Card for Model ID
This is a Speech Language Model (SLM) trained for generating speech continuations over discrete Hubert tokens.
The model was pre-trained using next-token prediction on a subset of LibriSpeech, Libri-Light and a synthetic dataset
sTinyStories. It was subsequently fine-tuned with DPO on
SpokenSwag.
This base SpeechLM can be used to generate continuations for speech segments, 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 curated speech datasets which contain mainly audio-books and stories, 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, a brief overview is provided below.
Training Data
This model was trained on a subset of LibriSpeech train,
Libri-Light and the synthetic dataset
sTinyStories for the pre-training phase. It was also trained with DPO on the synthetic
dataset SpokenSwag.
Training Procedure
This model was trained by next token prediction over several datasets, and then trained with DPO over SpokenSwag.
Please refer to the paper or code for the full training recipes.
Preprocessing
Speech tokens are extracted from the audio using Hubert-25hz, and quantised using the
official kmeans released with the model in textlesslib. Units are de-duplicated.
We encourage you to explore the official repository for full details - github.
Evaluation
The paper provides full results, we do give here some results and also refer to the demo page to listen to some samples.
This model was trained using only 2 Nvidia A100 GPU for 48 hours.
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{maimon2025slamming,
title={Slamming: Training a Speech Language Model on One GPU in a Day},
author={Gallil Maimon and Avishai Elmakies and Yossi Adi},
year={2025},
eprint={2502.15814},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.LG},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15814},
}