With the growing requirement for natural human-computer interaction, speech-based systems receive increasing attention as speech is one of the most common forms of daily communication. However, the existing speech models still experience high latency when generating the first audio token during streaming, which poses a significant bottleneck for deployment. To address this issue, we propose VITA-Audio, an end-to-end large speech model with fast audio-text token generation. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Multiple Cross-modal Token Prediction (MCTP) module that efficiently generates multiple audio tokens within a single model forward pass, which not only accelerates the inference but also significantly reduces the latency for generating the first audio in streaming scenarios. In addition, a four-stage progressive training strategy is explored to achieve model acceleration with minimal loss of speech quality. To our knowledge, VITA-Audio is the first multi-modal large language model capable of generating audio output during the first forward pass, enabling real-time conversational capabilities with minimal latency. VITA-Audio is fully reproducible and is trained on open-source data only. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves an inference speedup of 3~5x at the 7B parameter scale, but also significantly outperforms open-source models of similar model size on multiple benchmarks for automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and spoken question answering (SQA) tasks.

翻译：随着对自然人机交互需求的日益增长，基于语音的系统因其作为日常交流最常见形式之一而受到越来越多的关注。然而，现有语音模型在流式生成过程中产生首个音频令牌时仍存在高延迟问题，这构成了部署的重要瓶颈。为解决此问题，我们提出了VITA-Audio，一种具有快速音频-文本令牌生成能力的端到端大型语音模型。具体而言，我们引入了一个轻量级的多重跨模态令牌预测模块，该模块能在单次模型前向传播中高效生成多个音频令牌，这不仅加速了推理过程，还显著降低了流式场景下生成首个音频的延迟。此外，我们探索了一种四阶段渐进式训练策略，以在语音质量损失最小化的前提下实现模型加速。据我们所知，VITA-Audio是首个能在首次前向传播过程中生成音频输出的多模态大语言模型，实现了具有极低延迟的实时对话能力。VITA-Audio完全可复现，且仅使用开源数据进行训练。实验结果表明，我们的模型在70亿参数规模下实现了3~5倍的推理加速，并且在自动语音识别、文本到语音转换以及口语问答任务的多个基准测试中，显著优于同规模的开源模型。