arXiv AI

Listening Forward: Next Patch Embedding Prediction Enables Scalable Audio Learners

arXiv:2608. 19863v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has driven substantial progress in audio representation learning, though existing methods have increasingly relied on elaborate pre-training recipes to reach competitive performance.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

AudioTETRIS: Token Elimination via Transitional Importance Signals for Efficient Audio LLMs

AudioTETRIS is a training‑free, two‑stage token elimination framework designed for large audio language models. It leverages the geometry of audio encoder representations as an acoustic prior to compute per‑token importance scores, which guide progressive top‑k token selection across decoder layers. Experiments on Qwen2‑Audio‑7B, Phi‑4‑Multimodal, and Audio Flamingo 3 show that AudioTETRIS retains near‑full performance while using only 25% of audio tokens and outperforms existing training‑free baselines.

By Shreya Sajid, Anna Vettoruzzo, Joaquin Vanschoren
arXiv AI
Sep 1

TEMPO: Temporally-grounded Multi-task Post-training for Large Audio-Language Models

TEMPO is a unified model that adds temporally‑grounded capabilities to large audio‑language models, enabling timestamping of events, speakers, and sounds in audio, speech, and music. It introduces a supervised fine‑tuning stage featuring atomic timestamp tokens, a time‑aware projector with sinusoidal encodings, and a distance‑aware Gaussian loss, trained via a synthetic‑to‑real curriculum. Additionally, TEMPO employs reinforcement learning (GRPO) as a refinement step, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on a benchmark of 10K samples across five timestamping tasks, surpassing Audio Flamingo Next and Qwen3‑Omni.

By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Utathya Aich, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv AI
Jul 24

AG-REPA: Causal Layer Selection for Representation Alignment in Audio Flow Matching

arXiv:2603. 01006v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: REPresentation Alignment (REPA) improves the training of generative flow models by aligning intermediate hidden states with pretrained teacher features, but its effectiveness in token-conditioned audio Flow Matching critically depends on the choice of supervised layers, which is typically made heuristically based on the depth.

By Pengfei Zhang, Tianxin Xie, Minghao Yang, Li Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

BRIDLE: Generalized Self-supervised Learning with Quantization

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.

By Hoang M. Nguyen, Satya N. Shukla, Qiang Zhang, Hanchao Yu, Sreya D. Roy, Dipesh Tamboli, Taipeng Tian, Lingjiong Zhu, Yuchen Liu