LLaSO: A Foundational Framework for Reproducible Research in Large Language and Speech Model

TL;DR

LLaSO introduces an open, comprehensive framework for large speech-language models, including datasets, benchmarks, and a reference model, to improve reproducibility, transparency, and progress in the field.

Contribution

It provides the first fully open, end-to-end framework with datasets, benchmarks, and a reference model for reproducible research in large speech-language models.

Findings

The LLaSO-Base model achieves a normalized score of 0.72.

Broader training coverage improves performance.

Significant gaps remain in generalization to unseen tasks.

Abstract

The development of Large Speech-Language Models (LSLMs) has been slowed by fragmented architectures and a lack of transparency, hindering the systematic comparison and reproducibility of research. Unlike in the vision-language domain, the LSLM field suffers from the common practice of releasing model weights without their corresponding training data and configurations. To address these critical gaps, we introduce LLaSO, the first fully open, end-to-end framework for large-scale speech-language modeling. LLaSO provides the community with three essential resources: (1) LLaSO-Align, a 12M-instance speech-text alignment corpus; (2) LLaSO-Instruct, a 13.5M-instance multi-task instruction-tuning dataset; and (3) LLaSO-Eval, a reproducible benchmark for standardized evaluation. To validate our framework, we build and release LLaSO-Base, a 3.8B-parameter reference model trained exclusively on our public data. It achieves a normalized score of 0.72, establishing a strong, reproducible baseline that surpasses comparable models. Our analysis reveals that while broader training coverage enhances performance, significant generalization gaps persist on unseen tasks, particularly in pure audio scenarios. By releasing the complete stack of data, benchmarks, and models, LLaSO establishes a foundational open standard to unify research efforts and accelerate community-driven progress in LSLMs. We release the code, dataset, pretrained models, and results in https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LLaSO.