arXiv Machine Learning

Muting Tokens: Exploring Token Sparsification for Efficient Audio Transformers

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
Jul 7

OmniFocus: Query-Guided Modality-Balanced Token Compression for Omni-Modal Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 03050v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Omni modal large language models (OmniLLMs) have attracted wide attention for their ability to jointly process audio and video, but they generate large token sequences under audio-visual inputs, leading to substantial inference cost.

By Shijie Cao, Qingyu Zhang, Boxi Yu, Yuzhong Zhang, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception.

By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Sarah Wiegreffe, Dinesh Manocha, Ramani Duraiswami
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 3

CleanCodec: Efficient and Robust Speech Tokenization via Perceptually Guided Encoding

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 Machine Learning
Jul 24

Encode Once, Decode Never: Reusing Audio LM Internals for Efficient Temporal Localization

arXiv:2602. 10230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Audio language models process input audio into rich frame-level representations, but the standard approach to temporal localization generates timestamps as sequences of text tokens, which discards the frame-level representations in favor of autoregressive decoding.

By Joseph An, Phillip Keung, Jiaqi Wang, Orevaoghene Ahia, Noah A. Smith
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Manifold Projection and Iterative Autoencoder Refinement for Masked Language Modeling

The paper proposes a new architecture for masked language modeling that replaces the Transformer attention mechanism with a stack of low‑rank bottleneck autoencoders. Each autoencoder mixes information locally, across the full sequence, and across attention heads, compressing and reconstructing inputs without training‑dependent width. An iterative refinement process at masked positions pulls embeddings toward a weighted neighbor average and then projects them back onto the learned manifold, achieving comparable performance to BERT with roughly 1.9× fewer FLOPs and matching BERT on rare‑token performance through a frequency‑aware training schedule.

By Narges Mokhtari, Farzan Haddadi, Ebrahim Rezaii