X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs
This addresses the problem of capability misalignment in speech LLMs for applications requiring robust multi-modal interactions, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackled the performance gap between end-to-end speech LLMs and text-based counterparts by proposing X-OPD, a cross-modal on-policy distillation framework, which significantly narrowed this gap in complex tasks while preserving inherent capabilities.
While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.