Do We Need Distinct Representations for Every Speech Token? Unveiling and Exploiting Redundancy in Large Speech Language Models

Researchers demonstrate that large speech language models contain significant redundancy in their token representations, particularly in deeper layers. By introducing Affinity Pooling, a training-free token merging technique, they achieve 27.48% reduction in prefilling FLOPs and up to 1.7× memory savings while maintaining semantic accuracy, challenging the necessity of fully distinct tokens for acoustic processing.