Preference-Aware Pareto Steering for Multi-Task Speech LLMs

Liuyuan Jiang, Vishal Sunder, Samuel Thomas, Brian Kingsbury, Jeff Kuo +2

Speech large language models (LLMs) perform multiple tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR), timestamp prediction (TS), and speech translation (ST). Joint training of speech LLMs creates task trade-offs, yet standard training with fixed loss weights does not generally control the resulting trade-off according to deployment preferences. To address this, we propose Endpoint-Anchored Preference-Aware Sampling Uniformly along the Pareto Front (EA-SURF), an a priori method that adapts scalarization weights so that the resulting task trade-off reflects the desired preference. EA-SURF retains the standard weighted-loss training pipeline, tracking the current model's performance relative to each task-specific reference and adapting the scalarization weights as training proceeds. We theoretically show that EA-SURF can match a desired preference, with the update becoming stationary at the target under checkable regularity conditions. Across six three-objective speech LLM requests, EA-SURF empirically converges toward the requested targets and increases endpoint-inclusive normalized hypervolume by 17.8% over fixed loss weighting.