TLDR: Compressing Audio Tokens for Efficient Autoregressive Text-to-Speech
On the map: Efficient LLM inference and serving → Audio and omni-modal token compression
Abstract (arXiv)
Codec-based autoregressive (AR) speech language models have achieved strong text-to-speech (TTS) quality by modeling speech as sequences of discrete audio tokens with large pretrained backbones. However, this token-level formulation creates a structural efficiency bottleneck: speech-token sequences are much longer than text sequences, requiring the AR backbone to perform causal computation at every token position and maintain a KV cache that grows with the sequence length. We introduce TLDR, a patch-based autoregressive framework that accelerates codec-based AR-TTS by shifting the causal modeling from token-level speech sequences to patch-level sequences. TLDR groups consecutive codec tokens into compact latent patches using a lightweight compressor, models the resulting shorter patch sequence with a frozen pretrained AR-TTS backbone adapted by LoRA, and reconstructs fine-grained speech tokens within each patch using a speaker-conditioned extractor. With a patch size of 4, TLDR achieves a 1.8x inference speedup over the baseline AR-TTS model and reduces global KV-cache memory by up to 75%. Experimental results indicate that patch-level global causal modeling can be a practical way to reduce the inference cost of pretrained codec-based AR-TTS systems without replacing the existing modules.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Audio and omni-modal token compression, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving. Builds on 40 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2026.
Builds on
40 of 43 references.
References · 40
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28 more
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