arXiv:2606. 02739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio tokenizers serve as the discrete interface between continuous audio and Audio Language Models (ALMs), but existing tokenizers often struggle to support both understanding and generation.
arXiv:2605.27840v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio tokenizers are fundamental to unifying audio understanding and generation. Understanding requires high-level semantics, while generatio...
Neural audio codecs are a key component of speech processing pipelines, compressing audio into discrete tokens for downstream modeling. However, existing codecs struggle to balance reconstruction quality with token efficiency, often encoding perceptually irrelevant information such as background noise and recording artifacts at the expense of linguistically and acoustically meaningful content.
arXiv:2601. 09239v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech tokenizers are a key building block of fully discrete Speech LLMs.
arXiv:2609.22851v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) utilize either continuous features or discrete tokens, yet the optimal representation paradigm for general audio...
arXiv:2511. 20973v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) deliver strong performance across speech and audio tasks, but their audio encoders generate high-rate token sequences (e.
TokenMapper is a framework that enables direct translation between different speech tokenizers, allowing heterogeneous speech models to communicate without converting tokens to waveform audio. It handles mismatched token spaces, including single and multi-codebook representations, while maintaining a shared effective token rate. Experiments on GLM-4-Voice, MiMi, and DualCodec show that TokenMapper achieves word error rates close to native reconstructions, comparable human MOS scores, and significantly reduces latency compared to waveform bridging.
arXiv:2606. 06743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The popularity of neural audio codecs as speech tokenizers has surged with the advent of Multimodal Large Language Models.
arXiv:2606. 06357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous audio autoencoders reconstruct waveforms well but often produce latents with weak structure for understanding, while self-supervised audio encoders capture semantics but are not directly decodable.
arXiv:2512.21653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech codecs are usually optimized for waveform fidelity, allocating bits to acoustic detail that can be inferred from linguistic structure....
FireRedAudio is a 9‑billion‑parameter audio language model that separates continuous input representations for audio understanding and speech generation, enabling a single autoregressive LLM to perform tasks such as ASR, zero‑shot TTS, Instruct TTS, and semantic/acoustic speech editing. The model uses a dedicated Audio Encoder for recognition and a RedAE‑based pathway for generation, with the LLM directly generating text or conditioning a flow‑matching DiT to produce acoustic latents. Evaluations show competitive or leading performance in multilingual ASR, content‑accurate zero‑shot TTS, strong instruction following, and significant improvements in speech editing over prior work.
arXiv:2607. 29363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Balancing sequence length, representational capacity, and long-horizon stability is a central problem in autoregressive (AR) speech and audio generation.
BRIDLE is a self‑supervised encoder pretraining framework that extends bidirectional training to audio, image, and video by incorporating residual quantization (RQ) with multiple hierarchical codebooks. This approach allows fine‑grained discretization of latent representations and interleaves training between the encoder and tokenizer. Experiments show that BRIDLE achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on audio classification benchmarks and competitive performance on image and video classification tasks, outperforming traditional vector‑quantization methods.