MOSS-Speech: Towards True Speech-to-Speech Models Without Text Guidance

Spoken dialogue systems often rely on cascaded pipelines that transcribe, process, and resynthesize speech. While effective, this design discards paralinguistic cues and limits expressivity. Recent end-to-end methods reduce latency and better preserve these cues, yet still rely on text intermediates, creating a fundamental bottleneck. We present MOSS-Speech, a true speech-to-speech large language model that directly understands and generates speech without relying on text guidance. Our approach combines a modality-based layer-splitting architecture with a frozen pre-training strategy, preserving the reasoning and knowledge of pretrained text LLMs while adding native speech capabilities. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results in spoken question answering and delivers comparable speech-to-speech performance relative to existing text-guided systems, while still maintaining competitive text performance. By narrowing the gap between text-guided and direct speech generation, our work establishes a new paradigm for expressive and efficient end-to-end speech interaction.

Reinforcement Learning for Quantum Circuit Design: Using Matrix Representations

Quantum computing promises advantages over classical computing. The manufacturing of quantum hardware is in the infancy stage, called the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. A major challenge is automated quantum circuit design that map a quantum circuit to gates in a universal gate set. In this paper, we present a generic MDP modeling and employ Q-learning and DQN algorithms for quantum circuit design. By leveraging the power of deep reinforcement learning, we aim to provide an automatic and scalable approach over traditional hand-crafted heuristic methods.

FinLoRA: Finetuning Quantized Financial Large Language Models Using Low-Rank Adaptation

Finetuned large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in financial tasks, such as sentiment analysis and information retrieval. Due to privacy concerns, finetuning and deploying Financial LLMs (FinLLMs) locally are crucial for institutions. However, finetuning FinLLMs poses challenges including GPU memory constraints and long input sequences. In this paper, we employ quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) to finetune FinLLMs, which leverage low-rank matrix decomposition and quantization techniques to significantly reduce computational requirements while maintaining high model performance. We also employ data and pipeline parallelism to enable local finetuning using cost-effective, widely accessible GPUs. Experiments on financial datasets demonstrate that our method achieves substantial improvements in accuracy, GPU memory usage, and time efficiency, underscoring the potential of lowrank methods for scalable and resource-efficient LLM finetuning.