# TaDiCodec: Text-aware Diffusion Speech Tokenizer for Speech Language Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16790/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 85 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Image Generation using Residual Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01941/) (2022)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Beyond Fixed Frames: Dynamic Character-Aligned Speech Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23174/) (2026)
- [Label Smoothing Improves Gradient Ascent in LLM Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22376/) (2025)
- [Scaling Speech Tokenizers with Diffusion Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06602/) (2026)
- [TASTE-Streaming: Towards Streamable Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization and Embedding for Spoken Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12350/) (2026)
- [MimicLM: Zero-Shot Voice Imitation through Autoregressive Modeling of Pseudo-Parallel Speech Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11552/) (2026)
- [Communicating Sound Through Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08750/) (2026)
- [End-to-End Training for Discrete Token LLM based TTS System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09234/) (2026)
- [Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13989/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Speech-Text Compositional Powers: Instruction-Following Speech Language Models without Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02214/) (2026)
- [ReGen: Hierarchical Multi-Prompt Representation Generation for Efficient Waveform Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09134/) (2026)
- [StreamAlign: Streaming Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09719/) (2026)
- [ZipCodec: Ultra-Low-Frame-Rate Streaming Speech Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11642/) (2026)
- [GS-Codec: A Gaussian-Splatting Bottleneck for Neural Audio Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04651/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech tokenizers serve as foundational components for speech language models, yet current designs exhibit several limitations, including: 1) dependence on multi-layer residual vector quantization structures or high frame rates, 2) reliance on auxiliary pre-trained models for semantic distillation, and 3) requirements for complex two-stage training processes. In this work, we introduce the Text-aware Diffusion Transformer Speech Codec (TaDiCodec), a novel approach designed to overcome these challenges. TaDiCodec employs end-to-end optimization for quantization and reconstruction through a diffusion autoencoder, while integrating text guidance into the diffusion decoder to enhance reconstruction quality and achieve optimal compression. TaDiCodec achieves an extremely low frame rate of 6.25 Hz and a corresponding bitrate of 0.0875 kbps with a single-layer codebook for 24 kHz speech, while maintaining superior performance on critical speech generation evaluation metrics such as Word Error Rate (WER), speaker similarity (SIM), and speech quality (UTMOS). Notably, TaDiCodec employs a single-stage, end-to-end training paradigm, and obviating the need for auxiliary pre-trained models. We also validate the compatibility of TaDiCodec in language model based zero-shot text-to-speech with both autoregressive modeling and masked generative modeling, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency for speech language modeling, as well as a significantly small reconstruction-generation gap. We will open source our code and model checkpoints. Audio samples are are available at https:/tadicodec.github.io/. We release code and model checkpoints at https:/github.com/HeCheng0625/Diffusion-Speech-Tokenizer.