Speech language models (SpeechLMs) accept speech input and produce speech output, allowing for more natural human-computer interaction compared to text-based large language models (LLMs). Traditional approaches for developing SpeechLMs are constrained by the limited availability of unsupervised speech data and parallel speech-text data, which are significantly less abundant compared to text pre-training data, thereby limiting their scalability as LLMs. We propose a novel approach to scaling speech-text pre-training by leveraging large-scale synthetic interleaved data derived from text corpora, eliminating the need for parallel speech-text datasets. Our method efficiently constructs speech-text interleaved data by sampling text spans from existing text corpora and synthesizing corresponding speech spans using a text-to-token model, bypassing the need to generate actual speech. We also employ a supervised speech tokenizer derived from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model by incorporating a vector-quantized bottleneck into the encoder. This supervised training approach results in discrete speech tokens with strong semantic preservation even at lower sampling rates (e.g. 12.5Hz), while still maintaining speech reconstruction quality. Starting from a pre-trained language model and scaling our pre-training to 1 trillion tokens (with 600B synthetic interleaved speech-text data), we achieve state-of-the-art performance in both speech language modeling and spoken question answering, improving performance on spoken questions tasks from the previous SOTA of 13\% (Moshi) to 31\%. We further demonstrate that by fine-tuning the pre-trained model with speech dialogue data, we can develop an end-to-end spoken chatbot that achieves competitive performance comparable to existing baselines in both conversational abilities and speech quality, even operating exclusively in the speech domain.

Road anomaly detection is critical to safe autonomous driving, because current road scene understanding models are usually trained in a closed-set manner and fail to identify unknown objects. What's worse, it is difficult, if not impossible, to collect a large-scale dataset with anomaly annotations. So this paper studies unsupervised anomaly detection which finds out anomaly regions using scene parsing logits solely. While former methods depend on the weights learned from the closed training set as anchors for logit generation, we resort to language anchors that are learned from enormous paired vision and language data. Thanks to rich open-set semantic information contained in these language anchors, our method performs better than former unsupervised counterparts while maintaining the advantage of training without accessing any out-of-distribution data. We delve into this new paradigm and identify the superiority of using pair-wise binary logits, which we credit to a better understanding of the negation language anchor. Last but not least, we find that the former top-1 selection of semantic labels for uncertainty measurement is problematic in many cases and a new blended standardization strategy brings clear improvements to our solution. We report state-of-the-art performance on FS LostAndFound, LostAndFound and RoadAnomaly datasets among comparable methods. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/TB5z035/URAD-LA.git