Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM

TL;DR

Freeze-Omni is a novel multimodal speech-text LLM architecture that enables low-latency speech-to-speech dialogue by freezing the backbone LLM and training a specialized speech module with limited data.

Contribution

It introduces a three-stage training strategy for speech-to-speech dialogue using frozen LLMs and minimal multi-round text data, ensuring high-quality, low-latency spoken interactions.

Findings

Achieves speech-to-speech conversation with only 60,000 multi-round text Q&A data.

Maintains comparable intelligence levels in speech and text modalities.

Enables duplex dialogue with multi-task training.

Abstract

Rapidly developing large language models (LLMs) have brought tremendous intelligent applications. Especially, the GPT-4o's excellent duplex speech interaction ability has brought impressive experience to users. Researchers have recently proposed several multi-modal LLMs in this direction that can achieve user-agent speech-to-speech conversations. This paper proposes a novel speech-text multimodal LLM architecture called Freeze-Omni. Our main contribution is that the speech input and output modalities can be easily connected to a textual LLM while keeping the LLM's parameters frozen throughout the training process. We design a three-stage training strategy for modeling both the speech input and output, enabling Freeze-Omni to obtain speech-to-speech conversation ability using text-speech paired data (such as ASR and TTS data) and only 60,000 multi-round text Q&A data on 8 GPUs. Moreover, we can effectively ensure that the intelligence of the Freeze-Omni in the speech modality is at the same level compared with that in the text modality of its backbone LLM, while achieving low latency end-to-end spoken response. In addition, we also designed a method to achieve duplex dialogue ability through multi-task training, giving Freeze-Omni a more natural style of dialogue ability between users and agents. In summary, Freeze-Omni holds great potential to conduct speech-to-speech dialogue based on a multimodal LLM under the condition of a frozen LLM, avoiding the catastrophic forgetting problem caused by limited data and training resources.