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arXiv · 2606.02739

EntangleCodec: A Unified Discrete Audio Tokenizer via Semantic-Acoustic Entanglement

Hui Li·Yangfan Gao·Junlin Shang·Changhao Jiang·Tao Gui·Qi Zhang·Xuanjing Huang
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Abstract

Audio tokenizers serve as the discrete interface between continuous audio and Audio Language Models (ALMs), but existing tokenizers often struggle to support both understanding and generation. Reconstruction-oriented codecs preserve acoustic fidelity but lack rich semantics, while semantic-aware tokenizers typically rely on separate semantic and acoustic streams, introducing redundancy or misalignment. We propose \textbf{EntangleCodec}, a unified discrete audio tokenizer that learns caption-aligned semantic-acoustic representations before quantization. By aligning audio with rich captions rather than ASR transcripts, EntangleCodec captures linguistic content, speaker identity, emotion, prosody, and acoustic scenes within a compact token stream. A flow-matching diffusion decoder further enables high-quality reconstruction across speech, music, and general audio. EntangleCodec achieves reconstruction quality competitive with specialized codecs, outperforms all codec-based baselines on audio understanding by up to \textbf{+7.4\%} on MMAR, and supports both TTS and TTA generation in a unified framework. Furthermore, EntangleCodec-based audio language models demonstrate strong scaling behavior: even at \textit{0.6B} parameters, the model surpasses specialized continuous-representation LLMs with over \textit{13B} parameters across three benchmarks using \textbf{22$\times$} fewer parameters; scaling to \textit{8B} further establishes new state-of-the-art results on MMAR, highlighting that representation quality is as critical as model scale in audio language modeling. Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/luckyerr/EntangleCodec.

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Hui Li, Yangfan Gao, Junlin Shang, Changhao Jiang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang. 2026-09-03. EntangleCodec: A Unified Discrete Audio Tokenizer via Semantic-Acoustic Entanglement. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02739

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