Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Data
Paper · 2025 · William Held, Yanzhe Zhang, Minzhi Li et al.
Summary
End-to-end Speech LLMs are usually built with supervised finetuning on speech instruction data. That data is scarce, often recorded by few speakers, and the resulting models tend to lose abilities inherited from their text-only backbone. The authors propose the Distilled Voice Assistant (DiVA), which needs no annotated instruction responses. It uses only ASR data from CommonVoice: speech paired with transcripts. The frozen text LLM's own reaction to each transcript serves as the training target.
The model connects a Whisper-Large-v3 encoder to a frozen Llama 3 8B through a Q-Former whose weights are initialized from the Whisper decoder. Training combines two losses:
- an L2 loss pulling audio-derived embeddings toward the LLM's text input embeddings;
- a cheaper reformulation of KL-divergence distillation on the output distribution.
Although it sees only transcription data, DiVA handles spoken question answering, classification, emotion recognition and translation. In a user preference study it also beats Qwen 2 Audio, while using far less compute. The work shows that LLMs can be adapted to speech cheaply, without collecting new instruction datasets, using open, permissively licensed data.
Key points
- Training data: about 3.5k hours of CommonVoice only, compared with roughly 4.4k to over 370k hours for baselines such as SALMONN, Qwen Audio, Qwen 2 Audio and UltraVox.
- In user preference trials, DiVA beat Qwen 2 Audio 72% of the time, despite needing more than 100x less training compute.
- The authors' KL objective lowers distillation cost from O(V·d) to O(d), and adding input-side (L2) distillation is central to following instructions. On translation, outputs were in the correct target language 74% of the time, versus 1.4% for an output-distillation-only model (FastText language ID).
- Ablations on the connector:
- Training the Q-Former from scratch instead of from Whisper decoder weights drops QA from 55.17 to 47.63.
- Replacing the Q-Former with an MLP drops QA to 29.48 and classification to 33.85.
- Limitations: DiVA can only learn speech signals that share information with transcripts, which limits paralinguistic cues. It was evaluated only on single-turn interactions, and it inherits biases from the base LLM. Models, data and full training code are open-sourced.
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2,869 works
Cite
Cite as William Held, Yanzhe Zhang, Minzhi Li, Weiyan Shi, Michael J Ryan and Diyi Yang. 2025. Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Data. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{held2025distilling,
title = {{Distilling an End-to-End Voice Assistant Without Instruction Training Data}},
author = {William Held, Yanzhe Zhang, Minzhi Li, Weiyan Shi, Michael J Ryan and Diyi Yang},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.388},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.388}
}References
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