arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Oct 1

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.

By Shengbo Cai, Zhisheng Zhang, Zichao Nie, Jing Peng, Jingran Xie, Zhiyong Wu
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Benchmarking Language Modeling for Lossless Compression of Full-Fidelity Audio

arXiv:2603. 08683v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive "language" models (LMs) trained on raw waveforms can be repurposed for lossless audio compression, but prior work is limited to 8-bit audio, leaving open whether such approaches work for practical settings (16/24-bit) and can compete with existing codecs.

By Phillip Long, Zachary Novack, Chris Donahue
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 21

TTS-Q: Speaker-Aware Post-Training Quantization of Text-to-Speech Diffusion Transformers

The paper presents TTS‑Q, a post‑training quantization method that reduces the size of large diffusion transformer TTS models to 4‑bit precision while preserving speaker timbre and intelligibility. By identifying hard‑to‑quantize weights and activations and applying a mixed‑precision schedule that gives higher precision to late‑step feed‑forward activations, TTS‑Q restores timbre loss observed in standard 4‑bit PTQ. The approach also offers a calibrated‑W4A4 reference that lowers GPU memory usage, making TTS diffusion transformers more viable for on‑device, assistive, and real‑time applications.

By Xiaoqin Feng, Yuqi Li, Weilun Feng, Yi-Cheng Lin, Kai Li, Xianglong Wang, Kuo Yang, Chuanguang Yang, Yingli Tian, Wei Li, Zhongwei Cheng, Lin Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Asymmetric Classifier-Free Guidance for Target-Speaker ASR

The paper introduces asymmetric classifier‑free guidance (CFG) for target‑speaker ASR using Whisper, where a speaker‑conditioned branch predicts the target transcript and a speaker‑unconditioned branch predicts serialized multi‑speaker transcripts. CFG modulates the influence of speaker conditioning during decoding via a single guidance scale, which is first set globally on development data and then refined per utterance by a lightweight encoder‑based predictor while keeping the recognition model fixed. The resulting system yields up to 21.8% relative WER reduction over a condition‑only baseline and 5.6% over standard conditional decoding under domain shifts.

By Yiwen Guan, Jacob Whitehill
arXiv AI
Sep 15

CAL-MOS: Bridging Layers with Adapters for Robust MOS Prediction Across Speech Foundation Models

arXiv:2609.14956v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech Quality Assessment (SQA) is essential for modern speech technologies, and recent non-intrusive SQA predictors increasingly rely on Speech Foun...

By Alef Iury Siqueira Ferreira, Pedro Lustosa Rege Botelho, Fernanda Silva, Daniel Casanova, Rafael Faustino, Frederico Oliveira, Arlindo Galv\~ao Filho, Anderson da Silva Soares
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

TTS-Q: Perception-Guided Post-Training Quantization of Text-to-Speech Diffusion Transformers

The paper introduces TTS‑Q, a perception‑guided post‑training quantization method for zero‑shot text‑to‑speech diffusion transformers. It identifies that 4‑bit weight‑and‑activation quantization erodes speaker timbre, and addresses this by selecting hard‑to‑quantize items and applying a mixed‑precision schedule that gives higher precision to late‑step feed‑forward activations. The resulting approach restores timbre while preserving intelligibility and reduces GPU memory usage for resource‑constrained deployment.

By Xiaoqin Feng, Yuqi Li, Weilun Feng, Yi-Cheng Lin, Kai Li, Xianglong Wang, Kuo Yang, Chuanguang Yang, Yingli Tian, Wei Li, Zhongwei Cheng, Lin Chen