AudioLDM 2, but faster ⚡️

Mizar: A 159M-Parameter Audio-Language Model for Audio Understanding

Mizar is a 159.3‑million‑parameter audio‑language model designed for devices with limited memory and computation. It couples a compact CED‑Small audio encoder with SmolLM2‑135M via a frequency‑merging mapper and is trained in three stages—audio‑language alignment, audio‑dependent fine‑tuning, and post‑training—to improve performance on audio‑question tasks. Across five random seeds, Mizar outperforms all other sub‑200M‑parameter ALMs on MMAU, MMAR, and ADQA‑clean, achieving mean accuracies of 52.92%, 42.42%, and 36.02% respectively, while enabling local inference on a single CPU with an average latency of 1.09 seconds for MMAU questions.

FastSLM: Hierarchical Temporal Abstraction for Efficient Long-Form Speech Adaptation

arXiv:2601. 06199v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to long-form speech is bottlenecked by the explosive growth of input tokens.

Symbiotic Architecture for Post-Hoc Audio Extension of Frozen Language Models

The paper introduces a symbiotic architecture that equips large language models with audio‑understanding abilities without fine‑tuning their weights. It uses an injector module to write audio‑conditioned vectors into the LLM’s key‑value cache, allowing the model to act as an audio language model while keeping the backbone unchanged. The approach improves scalability—since injection cost depends on the injector width—and preserves the LLM’s original text performance, outperforming conventional frozen‑LLM methods and approaching fine‑tuned ALM results on audio tasks.

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.

I'll Keep an Ear Out: Teaching AudioLLMs Proactive Audio Assistance

arXiv:2609.21183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) operate reactively, responding only when queried. We introduce proactive audio assistance, where an AudioLLM...

Evaluating Audio Reasoning with Big Bench Audio