# Ming-UniAudio: Speech LLM for Joint Understanding, Generation and Editing with Unified Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [AISHELL-1: An Open-Source Mandarin Speech Corpus and A Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05522/) (2017)
- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Kimi-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18425/) (2025)
- [Emilia: An Extensive, Multilingual, and Diverse Speech Dataset for Large-Scale Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05361/) (2024)
- [Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation with Diffusion-based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05830/) (2022)
- [DNSMOS P.835: A Non-Intrusive Perceptual Objective Speech Quality Metric to Evaluate Noise Suppressors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01763/) (2021)
- [Vocos: Closing the gap between time-domain and Fourier-based neural vocoders for high-quality audio synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00814/) (2023)
- [CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17589/) (2025)
- [The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge: Datasets, Subjective Testing Framework, and Challenge Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13981/) (2020)
- [Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05256/) (2022)
- [VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16973/) (2024)
- [AISHELL-3: A Multi-speaker Mandarin TTS Corpus and the Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11567/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Ming-Flash-Omni: A Sparse, Unified Architecture for Multimodal Perception and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24821/) (2025)
- [MMAE: A Massive Multitask Audio Editing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07229/) (2026)
- [dots.tts Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07080/) (2026)
- [WavCube: Unifying Speech Representation for Understanding and Generation via Semantic-Acoustic Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06407/) (2026)
- [FireRedAudio: A General-Purpose Audio Language Model with Decoupled Continuous Representations for Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24168/) (2026)
- [Unifying Speech Editing Detection and Content Localization via Prior-Enhanced Audio LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21463/) (2026)
- [LLaDA-TTS: Unifying Speech Synthesis and Zero-Shot Editing via Masked Diffusion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26364/) (2026)
- [F3-Tokenizer: Taming Audio Autoencoder Latents for Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06357/) (2026)
- [AuK Technical Report: An Open-Source Foundational Model for Speech Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08936/) (2026)
- [DuoTok: Source-Aware Dual-Track Music Tokenization for Vocal-Accompaniment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20224/) (2025)
- [VocalParse: Towards Unified and Scalable Singing Voice Transcription with Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04613/) (2026)
- [LoSATok: Low-Dimensional Semantic-Acoustic Tokenizer for Cross-Domain Audio Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27840/) (2026)
- [RedVox: Safety and Fairness Gaps in Speech Models Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26968/) (2026)
- [COT-TTS: Audio Context-Aware Text-to-Speech with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22697/) (2026)
- [UNITE-AUDIO: Joint Learning of Continuous Tokenization and Latent Flow Matching for Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28206/) (2026)
- [SEmoEdit: Probing and Harnessing the Editability of Pre-trained Speech Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34648/) (2026)
- [VoTSpeech: Decoupling Voice Design from Speech Generation in Instruction-Following TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14694/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing speech models suffer from competing requirements on token representations by understanding and generation tasks. This discrepancy in representation prevents speech language models from performing instruction-based free-form editing. To solve this challenge, we introduce a novel framework that unifies speech understanding, generation, and editing. The core of our unified model is a unified continuous speech tokenizer MingTok-Audio, the first continuous tokenizer to effectively integrate semantic and acoustic features, which makes it suitable for both understanding and generation tasks. Based on this unified continuous audio tokenizer, we developed the speech language model Ming-UniAudio, which achieved a balance between generation and understanding capabilities. Ming-UniAudio sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) records on 8 out of 12 metrics on the ContextASR benchmark. Notably, for Chinese voice cloning, it achieves a highly competitive Seed-TTS-WER of 0.95. Leveraging this foundational model, we further trained a dedicated speech editing model Ming-UniAudio-Edit, the first speech language model that enables universal, free-form speech editing guided solely by natural language instructions, handling both semantic and acoustic modifications without timestamp condition. To rigorously assess the editing capability and establish a foundation for future research, we introduce Ming-Freeform-Audio-Edit, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for instruction-based free-form speech editing, featuring diverse scenarios and evaluation dimensions spanning semantic correctness, acoustic quality, and instruction alignment. We open-sourced the continuous audio tokenizer, the unified foundational model, and the free-form instruction-based editing model to facilitate the development of unified audio understanding, generation, and manipulation.