Whisper-GPT: A Hybrid Representation Audio Large Language Model
Authors: name: Prateek Verma

We propose WHISPER-GPT: A generative large language model (LLM) for speech
and music that allows us to work with continuous audio representations and
discrete tokens simultaneously as part of a single architecture. There has been
a huge surge in generative audio, speech, and music models that utilize
discrete audio tokens derived from neural compression algorithms, e.g. ENCODEC.
However, one of the major drawbacks of this approach is handling the context
length. It blows up for high-fidelity generative architecture if one has to
account for all the audio contents at various frequencies for the next token
prediction. By combining continuous audio representation like the spectrogram
and discrete acoustic tokens, we retain the best of both worlds: Have all the
information needed from the audio at a specific time instance in a single
token, yet allow LLM to predict the future token to allow for sampling and
other benefits discrete space provides. We show how our architecture improves
the perplexity and negative log-likelihood scores for the next token prediction
compared to a token-based LLM for speech and music.