arXiv AI

Discrete vs. Continuous: A Comprehensive Study of Unified Audio Understanding in LALMs

arXiv AI
1d ago

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
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
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
arXiv AI
Sep 15

DuoTok: Source-Aware Dual-Track Music Tokenization for Vocal-Accompaniment Generation

DuoTok is a source‑aware dual‑track music tokenizer designed for vocal‑accompaniment generation. It first learns a semantic audio representation via self‑supervised pretraining, then refines source‑aware structure with feature‑replacement noise and multi‑task supervision (spectral reconstruction, source separation regularization, and an ASR head for lyric alignment). The encoder is frozen and hard‑routed codebooks for vocals and accompaniment are learned, while a diffusion decoder restores fine acoustic detail from the discrete tokens, achieving a favorable predictability‑fidelity trade‑off at ultra‑low bitrate across public benchmarks.

By Rui Lin, Zhiyue Wu, Jiahe Lei, Kangdi Wang, Weixiong Chen, Junyu Dai, Tao Jiang