arXiv AI

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

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
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 AI
Oct 1

Audio Token Attention Is Predictable Before the Language Model Runs

The paper introduces Triage, a method that predicts the attention distribution of audio tokens before a language model processes them, enabling early pruning of less important tokens. By fitting a linear map to encoder outputs, Triage achieves high correlation (ρ ≥ 0.69) with full-model attention across eleven of thirteen large audio language models. Using this prediction, Triage compresses audio inputs while maintaining near‑full performance, outperforming baselines in transcription accuracy and significantly increasing the amount of audio that fits within a model’s context window.

By Kyoungjun Park, Yunzhe Li, Lili Qiu
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 AI
Sep 2

Heard but Not Heeded: Paralinguistic Information Encoding and Loss in Audio-Language Models

The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.

By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
arXiv AI
Jun 9

End-to-End Training for Discrete Token LLM based TTS System

arXiv:2606. 09234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech (TTS) systems typically adopt a cascaded pipeline consisting of a speech tokenizer, an autoregressive large language model (LLM), and a diffusion based flow-matching (FM) model, with these components trained independently.

By Changfeng Gao, Yong Ren, Jun Yuan, Ye Bai, Zhao You, ShiDong Shang
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