Scaling Speech Tokenizers with Diffusion Autoencoders
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Abstract (arXiv)
Speech tokenizers are foundational to speech language models, yet existing approaches face two major challenges: (1) balancing trade-offs between encoding semantics for understanding and acoustics for reconstruction, and (2) achieving low bit rates and low token rates. We propose Speech Diffusion Tokenizer (SiTok), a diffusion autoencoder that jointly learns semantic-rich representations through supervised learning and enables high-fidelity audio reconstruction with diffusion. We scale SiTok to 1.6B parameters and train it on 2 million hours of speech. Experiments show that SiTok outperforms strong baselines on understanding, reconstruction and generation tasks, at an extremely low token rate of 12.5 Hz and a bit-rate of 200 bits-per-second.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 72 of its 80 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.
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