A Simple Method to Enhance Pre-trained Language Models with Speech Tokens for Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Calbucura, Nicolas, Guillen, Jose, Barriere, Valentin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Calbucura, Nicolas
Guillen, Jose
Barriere, Valentin
author_facet Calbucura, Nicolas
Guillen, Jose
Barriere, Valentin
contents This paper presents a simple method that allows to easily enhance textual pre-trained large language models with speech information, when fine-tuned for a specific classification task. A classical issue with the fusion of many embeddings from audio with text is the large length of the audio sequence compared to the text one. Our method benefits from an existing speech tokenizer trained for Audio Speech Recognition that output long sequences of tokens from a large vocabulary, making it difficult to integrate it at low cost in a large language model. By applying a simple lasso-based feature selection on multimodal Bag-of-Words representation, we retain only the most important audio tokens for the task, and adapt the language model to them with a self-supervised language modeling objective, before fine-tuning it on the downstream task. We show this helps to improve the performances compared to an unimodal model, to a bigger SpeechLM or to integrating audio via a learned representation. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Argumentative Fallacy Detection and Classification tasks where audio was previously believed counterproductive, and affective computing tasks on a widely-used dataset. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the method, showing that even a random audio token selection helps enhancing the unimodal model. Our code is available [online](https://github.com/salocinc/EACL26SpeechTokFallacy/).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07571
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Simple Method to Enhance Pre-trained Language Models with Speech Tokens for Classification
Calbucura, Nicolas
Guillen, Jose
Barriere, Valentin
Computation and Language
Multimedia
This paper presents a simple method that allows to easily enhance textual pre-trained large language models with speech information, when fine-tuned for a specific classification task. A classical issue with the fusion of many embeddings from audio with text is the large length of the audio sequence compared to the text one. Our method benefits from an existing speech tokenizer trained for Audio Speech Recognition that output long sequences of tokens from a large vocabulary, making it difficult to integrate it at low cost in a large language model. By applying a simple lasso-based feature selection on multimodal Bag-of-Words representation, we retain only the most important audio tokens for the task, and adapt the language model to them with a self-supervised language modeling objective, before fine-tuning it on the downstream task. We show this helps to improve the performances compared to an unimodal model, to a bigger SpeechLM or to integrating audio via a learned representation. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Argumentative Fallacy Detection and Classification tasks where audio was previously believed counterproductive, and affective computing tasks on a widely-used dataset. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the method, showing that even a random audio token selection helps enhancing the unimodal model. Our code is available [online](https://github.com/salocinc/EACL26SpeechTokFallacy/).
title A Simple Method to Enhance Pre-trained Language Models with Speech Tokens for Classification
topic Computation and Language
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07571