OSUM-Pangu: An Open-Source Multidimension Speech Understanding Foundation Model Built upon OpenPangu on Ascend NPUs

Yujie Liao, Xuelong Geng, Hongfei Xue, Shuiyuan Wang, Lei Xie

Code ｜ Paper

Recent advancements in Speech Large Language Models have significantly enhanced multi-dimensional speech understanding. However, the majority of high-performance frameworks are predominantly optimized for GPU centric ecosystems and proprietary backbones, creating a significant gap for deployment on non-CUDA computing infrastructures. In this paper, we present OSUM-Pangu, a fully open-source speech understanding foundation model developed on a completely non-CUDA software and hardware stack. By integrating an audio encoder with the openPangu-7B LLM backbone, we successfully implement the entire training and inference pipeline on the Ascend NPU platform. To facilitate efficient task alignment under non-CUDA resource constraints, we adopt a practical training process that sequentially bridges speech perception and user intent recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that OSUM-Pangu achieves task accuracy comparable to mainstream GPU-based models while maintaining robust natural language interaction capabilities. Our work provides a reproducible, non-CUDA baseline for the open-source speech community, promoting the independent evolution of multimodal intelligence.

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Architecture

The overall architecture of OSUM-Pangu is shown below:

The model mainly consists of three components:

1. Speech Encoder

Whisper-medium
Responsible for extracting speech representations.

2. Adapter

Transforms acoustic features into tokens compatible with the LLM input space.

3. Intent-aware LLM

openPangu-Embedded-7B-V1.1

Responsible for:

• Parsing natural language instructions
• Identifying user intent
• Determining which speech task to execute

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Training Strategy

We adopt a a three-stage training proces, illustrated below:

Stage 1: Speech Understanding Alignment

Goal: Equip the model with multi-task speech understanding capability.

Characteristics:

• Only speech-related modules are trained
• Establish strong acoustic representation ability

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Stage 2: Intent Understanding

Goal: Enable the model to understand natural language user instructions.

Examples:

Please transcribe this audio.
Analyze the speaker's emotion.
Identify what event happens in the audio.

The model learns:

• Instruction semantic understanding
• Task mapping capability

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Stage 3: Joint Instruction Tuning

In the final stage, joint training allows the model to:

• Automatically parse user instructions
• Identify task types
• Execute the corresponding speech understanding tasks

Without requiring fixed templates, such as:

What is the emotion of this speech?
Can you transcribe this audio?
What event happens in the audio?

The model can correctly understand and execute all of them.

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Results

Dataset Configuration

Our experiments follow the task definitions of the OSUM framework. To maintain the linguistic reasoning capability of the backbone, we incorporate 2M entries from Alpaca-CoT for text-based interactions, with queries synthesized using CosyVoice 2. To evaluate the model's robustness in real-world scenarios, we utilize an Intent-Instruction Set (IIS) containing over 80k training samples and 4k test prompts, covering diverse colloquial user queries.

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Multi-task Speech Understanding Performance

OSUM-Pangu demonstrates competitive performance across diverse tasks compared to GPU-based baselines Qwen2-Audio and OSUM, proving the effectiveness of the NPU-based pipeline.

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Instruction Following Performance (IFR)

Instruction Following Rate (IFR) measures the ability of the model to parse natural language instructions and execute the corresponding tasks.

The metric is defined as:

$$ IFR = \left( \frac{N_{correct}}{N_{total}} \right) \times 100% $$

where:

• $N_{correct}$ represents the number of correctly executed instructions
• $N_{total}$ represents the total number of evaluation samples Compared with mainstream open-source models, OSUM-Pangu achieves significantly better performance:

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Flexibility vs Accuracy

We evaluate whether natural language instructions (NL) degrade performance compared to fixed instructions (FI).

Results show that the model maintains strong flexibility while preserving task accuracy.

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Conclusion:

Only minor performance drops appear in relatively niche tasks such as:

• Style recognition
• Event detection

Core tasks such as:

• ASR
• SER
• SAP

remain almost unchanged, validating the effectiveness of the three-stage training process.

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Speech-to-Text Chat (STTC) Capability

We further evaluate the model in conversational reasoning scenarios.

OSUM-Pangu outperforms GLM-4-Voice on the TriviaQA and WebQ benchmarks.

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How to Use the OSUM-Pangu Framework for Training and Inference

Environment Setup

Before starting, please ensure that your device supports NPU and the Python environment is properly configured.

We recommend running the code on a Linux system.

If Conda is not installed, please refer to: https://blog.csdn.net/qq_41636123/article/details/130266232

# Create a new conda environment
conda create -n osum_pangu python=3.10
conda activate osum_pangu

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/ASLP-lab/OSUM-Pangu.git
cd OSUM-Pangu

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt -i https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple

Model Download

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download

snapshot_download(
    repo_id="ASLP-lab/OSUM-Pangu",
    local_dir="path",
    local_dir_use_symlinks=False,
    endpoint="https://hf-mirror.com"
)

Inference

This project provides batch inference scripts for all tasks under in ：OSUM-Pangu/infer_code:

python infer_ASR.py

Training

To ensure a smooth training process, please follow the steps below.

1. Data Preparation

Data can be prepared in three formats:

raw、shard、combine

Recommended: shard format

After preparing the dataset, write the generated data index into the following configuration file:

OSUM-Pangu/conf/data_s2t_tmp.yaml

2. Start Training

Run the main training script:

OSUM-Pangu/train.sh