arXiv Machine Learning

PairAlign: A Framework for Sequence Tokenization via Self-Alignment with Applications to Audio Tokenization

arXiv:2605. 06582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many operations on sensory data -- comparison, memory, retrieval, and reasoning -- are naturally expressed over discrete symbolic structures.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

FireRedAudio: A General-Purpose Audio Language Model with Decoupled Continuous Representations for Understanding and Generation

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.

By Feiyu Shen, Fenglong Xie, Junjie Li, Kun Xie, Lei Xie, Xu Tang, Xuelong Geng, Yan Jia, Yao Hu, Yichen Han, Yichen Wu, Ziqi Dai, Junjie Chen, Kai Huang, Manzhen Wei, Yixuan Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

NAC: Neural Action Codec for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces the Neural Action Codec (NAC), a convolutional encoder‑decoder architecture that treats short robot action trajectories as multi‑channel 1D signals and compresses them using a multi‑scale residual vector quantization (RVQGAN) model. NAC replaces traditional discrete action tokenizers with a compact, ordered token space via offset codebooks, allowing standard autoregressive policies to operate over short, structured sequences while a Vocos‑style decoder reconstructs the actions. Experiments on LIBERO‑10, RoboMimic, and real‑world manipulation tasks show that NAC achieves higher reconstruction fidelity and better average success rates than existing binning, FAST, and VQ‑based tokenizers at comparable or improved compression rates.

By Ahad Jawaid, Yu Xiang
arXiv AI
Sep 15

DuoTok: Source-Aware Dual-Track Music Tokenization for Vocal-Accompaniment Generation

DuoTok is a source‑aware dual‑track music tokenizer designed for vocal‑accompaniment generation. It first learns a semantic audio representation via self‑supervised pretraining, then refines source‑aware structure with feature‑replacement noise and multi‑task supervision (spectral reconstruction, source separation regularization, and an ASR head for lyric alignment). The encoder is frozen and hard‑routed codebooks for vocals and accompaniment are learned, while a diffusion decoder restores fine acoustic detail from the discrete tokens, achieving a favorable predictability‑fidelity trade‑off at ultra‑low bitrate across public benchmarks.

By Rui Lin, Zhiyue Wu, Jiahe Lei, Kangdi Wang, Weixiong Chen, Junyu Dai, Tao Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

How Far Should Tokenization Go? Predictive Effectiveness and Relational Losslessness

The paper proposes the Effectiveness–Losslessness Framework to guide tokenization in domains beyond language, using predictive codelength as a criterion. It introduces two boundaries: the Fact–Token Boundary, where observable structure should be encoded into tokens, and the Token–State Boundary, where context‑dependent relations should remain for model state rather than being pre‑tokenized. Experiments on symbolic music show that making musical time explicit and applying tonal‑frame canonicalization improve predictive performance, while fixed pitch coordinates and reversible BPE can increase predictive code length, indicating that carrier compaction alone does not guarantee better predictions.

By Yi Wang