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arXiv · 2511.15145

Auden-Voice: General-Purpose Voice Encoder for Speech and Language Understanding

Mingyue Huo·Wei-Cheng Tseng·Yiwen Shao·Hao Zhang·Dong Yu
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Abstract

Human voice encodes both identity and paralinguistic cues, yet encoders in large audio-language models (LALMs) rarely balance both aspects. In this work, we present a study toward building a general-purpose voice encoder that captures nuanced voice cues. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we find that multi-task training yields the most balanced representations, whereas contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) primarily improves retrieval without enhancing paralinguistic understanding. Our final encoder, Auden-Voice, also demonstrates strong performance when integrated with LLMs. The code and training recipes will be released with the audio understanding toolkit Auden.

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Mingyue Huo, Wei-Cheng Tseng, Yiwen Shao, Hao Zhang, Dong Yu. 2025-11-19. Auden-Voice: General-Purpose Voice Encoder for Speech and Language Understanding. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15145

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