The recent release of GPT-4o showcased the potential of end-to-end multimodal models, not just in terms of low latency but also in their ability to understand and generate expressive speech with rich emotions. While the details are unknown to the open research community, it likely involves significant amounts of curated data and compute, neither of which is readily accessible. In this paper, we present BLSP-Emo (Bootstrapped Language-Speech Pretraining with Emotion support), a novel approach to developing an end-to-end speech-language model capable of understanding both semantics and emotions in speech and generate empathetic responses. BLSP-Emo utilizes existing speech recognition (ASR) and speech emotion recognition (SER) datasets through a two-stage process. The first stage focuses on semantic alignment, following recent work on pretraining speech-language models using ASR data. The second stage performs emotion alignment with the pretrained speech-language model on an emotion-aware continuation task constructed from SER data. Our experiments demonstrate that the BLSP-Emo model excels in comprehending speech and delivering empathetic responses, both in instruction-following tasks and conversations.

In the evolving landscape of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), the pretrain-then-finetune paradigm has yielded impressive results. However, the persistent challenge of Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) remains a hurdle. While previous work has introduced Continual Learning (CL) methods to address CF, these approaches grapple with the delicate balance between avoiding forgetting and maintaining system extensibility. To address this, we propose a CL method, named F-MALLOC (Feed-forward Memory ALLOCation). F-MALLOC is inspired by recent insights highlighting that feed-forward layers emulate neural memories and encapsulate crucial translation knowledge. It decomposes feed-forward layers into discrete memory cells and allocates these memories to different tasks. By learning to allocate and safeguard these memories, our method effectively alleviates CF while ensuring robust extendability. Besides, we propose a comprehensive assessment protocol for multi-stage CL of NMT systems. Experiments conducted following this new protocol showcase the superior performance of F-MALLOC, evidenced by higher BLEU scores and almost zero forgetting.