arXiv AI

UniAE-MoE: A Unified Audio Encoder via Mixture of Experts

UniAE-MoE is a unified audio encoder that uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to model cross‑domain audio representations. It integrates encoder components from Qwen2‑Audio and Audio‑Flamingo 3, enhances them with SwiGLU and shared experts, and applies a two‑stage instruction‑tuning strategy along with task‑specific data scaling. The model achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on the XARES‑LLM benchmark (0.802) and tops the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, demonstrating strong generalization across speech, music, and general audio tasks.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Unified Audio Intelligence Without Regressing on Text Intelligence

arXiv:2607. 05196v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech.

By Zhifeng Kong, Sang-gil Lee, Jaehyeon Kim, Boxin Wang, Zihan Liu, Sungwon Kim, Yang Chen, Arushi Goel, Rajarshi Roy, Wenliang Dai, Zhuolin Yang, Yangyi Chen, Dongfu Jiang, Sreyan Ghosh, Tuomas Rintamaki, Andrew Tao, Jonathan Raiman, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Correlation-Guided Encoder Selection for Multi-Encoder Large Audio-Language Models

The paper introduces CUES, a lightweight heuristic for selecting encoder combinations in large audio‑language models by estimating complementarity through Pearson correlations of single‑encoder performance profiles. Using a frozen SmolLM2‑135M backbone, CUES consistently identifies optimal encoder sets for each track on the XARES‑LLM benchmark without requiring fusion training or test data. On broad audio tasks, CUES selects a diverse trio of encoders, improving performance by 4.3% over Whisper‑medium, while on text generation it opts for a focused speech‑only pair, outperforming mHuBERT‑147 by 6.3%. The results illustrate how correlation signals guide a diversity–interference trade‑off across different task families.

By Pei-Jun Liao, Hung-Shin Lee, Wenze Ren, Kuo-Hsuan Hung, Hung-yi Lee, Hsin-Min Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Scaling Audio Models Efficiently: Joint Optimization of Scale, Resolution, Adaptation, Precision, and Sparsity

The paper introduces a compression framework for the Whisper automatic speech recognition model that jointly optimizes six deployment dimensions—model size, temporal resolution, encoder token stride, low‑rank adaptation capacity, weight precision, and sparsity pattern—using NSGA‑III. The optimization targets three objectives: word error rate, inference FLOPs, and memory footprint. Evaluating 1,680 configurations, the study identifies compression combinations that outperform single‑axis scaling and notes that 1:4 structured sparsity cannot maintain acceptable accuracy within the tested budgets.

By Vyom Agarwal, Mokshda Gangrade, Siddharth Pal, Jerry Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Mizar: A 159M-Parameter Audio-Language Model for Audio Understanding

Mizar is a 159.3‑million‑parameter audio‑language model designed for devices with limited memory and computation. It couples a compact CED‑Small audio encoder with SmolLM2‑135M via a frequency‑merging mapper and is trained in three stages—audio‑language alignment, audio‑dependent fine‑tuning, and post‑training—to improve performance on audio‑question tasks. Across five random seeds, Mizar outperforms all other sub‑200M‑parameter ALMs on MMAU, MMAR, and ADQA‑clean, achieving mean accuracies of 52.92%, 42.42%, and 36.02% respectively, while enabling local inference on a single CPU with an average latency of 1.09 seconds for MMAU questions.

By Kaiyang Li, Shaobo Han, Yue Tian, Shihao Ji
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