SpeechMapper: Speech-to-text Embedding Projector for LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mohapatra, Biswesh, Boito, Marcely Zanon, Calapodescu, Ioan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Mohapatra, Biswesh
Boito, Marcely Zanon
Calapodescu, Ioan
author_facet Mohapatra, Biswesh
Boito, Marcely Zanon
Calapodescu, Ioan
contents Current speech LLMs bridge speech foundation models to LLMs using projection layers, training all of these components on speech instruction data. This strategy is computationally intensive and susceptible to task and prompt overfitting. We present SpeechMapper, a cost-efficient speech-to-LLM-embedding training approach that mitigates overfitting, enabling more robust and generalizable models. Our model is first pretrained without the LLM on inexpensive hardware, and then efficiently attached to the target LLM via a brief 1K-step instruction tuning (IT) stage. Through experiments on speech translation and spoken question answering, we demonstrate the versatility of SpeechMapper's pretrained block, presenting results for both task-agnostic IT, an ASR-based adaptation strategy that does not train in the target task, and task-specific IT. In task-agnostic settings, Speechmapper rivals the best instruction-following speech LLM from IWSLT25, despite never being trained on these tasks, while in task-specific settings, it outperforms this model across many datasets, despite requiring less data and compute. Overall, SpeechMapper offers a practical and scalable approach for efficient, generalizable speech-LLM integration without large-scale IT.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_20417
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SpeechMapper: Speech-to-text Embedding Projector for LLMs
Mohapatra, Biswesh
Boito, Marcely Zanon
Calapodescu, Ioan
Computation and Language
Current speech LLMs bridge speech foundation models to LLMs using projection layers, training all of these components on speech instruction data. This strategy is computationally intensive and susceptible to task and prompt overfitting. We present SpeechMapper, a cost-efficient speech-to-LLM-embedding training approach that mitigates overfitting, enabling more robust and generalizable models. Our model is first pretrained without the LLM on inexpensive hardware, and then efficiently attached to the target LLM via a brief 1K-step instruction tuning (IT) stage. Through experiments on speech translation and spoken question answering, we demonstrate the versatility of SpeechMapper's pretrained block, presenting results for both task-agnostic IT, an ASR-based adaptation strategy that does not train in the target task, and task-specific IT. In task-agnostic settings, Speechmapper rivals the best instruction-following speech LLM from IWSLT25, despite never being trained on these tasks, while in task-specific settings, it outperforms this model across many datasets, despite requiring less data and compute. Overall, SpeechMapper offers a practical and scalable approach for efficient, generalizable speech-LLM integration without large-scale IT.
title SpeechMapper: Speech-to-text Embedding Projector for LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20417