UniAudio-Token: Empowering Semantic Speech Tokenizers with General Audio Perception

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31521v1
• Date: Fri, 29 May 2026 16:36:21 GMT
• Title: UniAudio-Token: Empowering Semantic Speech Tokenizers with General Audio Perception
• Abstract summary: UniAudio-Token is a framework that empowers semantic tokenizers with general audio perception without compromising speech ability.<n>SAP provide structured supervision by audio into linguistic content, vocal attributes, and auditory-scene primitives.<n>SAE introduces a content-aware gating mechanism that adaptively restores fine-grained acoustic details from shallow layers.
• Score: 53.41256816230278
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Semantic speech tokenizers have become a widely used interface for Audio-LLMs, owing to their compact single-codebook design and strong linguistic alignment. However, their focus on linguistic abstraction induces acoustic blindness, limiting their applicability beyond speech-centric tasks. We propose UniAudio-Token, a framework that empowers semantic tokenizers with general audio perception without compromising speech ability. Instead of altering the semantic paradigm, UniAudio-Token mitigates its information loss through two key innovations: (1) Semantic-Acoustic Primitives (SAP) provide structured supervision by decomposing audio into linguistic content, vocal attributes, and auditory-scene primitives; and (2) Semantic-Acoustic Equilibrium (SAE) introduces a content-aware gating mechanism that adaptively restores fine-grained acoustic details from shallow layers. Extensive evaluations show that UniAudio-Token learns comprehensive universal representations while preserving high-fidelity speech generation. When integrated with downstream LLMs, it outperforms all single-codebook baseline tokenizers on both understanding and generation tasks, effectively serving as a unified audio interface. We publicly release all our code, including training and inference scripts, together with the model checkpoints at https://github.com/Tencent/Universal_Audio_Tokenizer.

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