S. Sivasankaran

Teaching LLMs to Hear Who Spoke What: Metadata-Supervised Pretraining for Encoder-Free Speech-LLMs

Encoder-based speech large language models (Speech-LLMs) commonly employ pretrained speech encoders that prioritize linguistic content but may discard fine-grained acoustic cues essential for speaker discrimination and paralinguistic understanding. Encoder-free Speech-LLMs instead map Mel-spectrogram features directly...