OpenOmni: Large Language Models Pivot Zero-shot Omnimodal Alignment across Language with Real-time Self-Aware Emotional Speech Synthesis

Run Luo, Ting-En Lin, Haonan Zhang, Yuchuan Wu, Xiong Liu, Min Yang, Yongbin Li, Longze Chen, Jiaming Li, Lei Zhang, Yangyi Chen, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Fei Huang

Abstract: Recent advancements in omnimodal learning have significantly improved understanding and generation across images, text, and speech, yet these developments remain predominantly confined to proprietary models. The lack of high-quality omnimodal datasets and the challenges of real-time emotional speech synthesis have notably hindered progress in open-source research. To address these limitations, we introduce \name, a two-stage training framework that integrates omnimodal alignment and speech generation to develop a state-of-the-art omnimodal large language model. In the alignment phase, a pre-trained speech model undergoes further training on text-image tasks, enabling (near) zero-shot generalization from vision to speech, outperforming models trained on tri-modal datasets. In the speech generation phase, a lightweight decoder is trained on speech tasks with direct preference optimization, enabling real-time emotional speech synthesis with high fidelity. Experiments show that \name surpasses state-of-the-art models across omnimodal, vision-language, and speech-language benchmarks. It achieves a 4-point absolute improvement on OmniBench over the leading open-source model VITA, despite using 5x fewer training samples and a smaller model size (7B vs. 7x8B). Additionally, \name achieves real-time speech generation with <1s latency at non-autoregressive mode, reducing inference time by 5x compared to autoregressive methods, and improves emotion classification accuracy by 7.7\%