C-Gate

Is Text All You Need? Text as a Universal Information Bottleneck for Speech LLMs

arXiv:2606.09366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) provide a powerful reasoning backbone for speech understanding, but integrating continuous acoustic signals into a frozen LLM remains challenging. Existing speech-to-LLM interfaces typically operate at two extremes: either enforcing near-discrete token alignment, which benefits transcription but loses paralinguistic information, or learning unconstrained continuous representations, which can drift away from the...