Unified Audio Intelligence Without Regressing on Text Intelligence

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

This paper introduces Audex, a unified audio-text LLM from NVIDIA that achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple audio and speech tasks while preserving strong text reasoning capabilities without regression.

Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unified audio-text LLM built on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM. Audex adopts a simple unified design with a single Transformer decoder: audio inputs are encoded and projected into the text embedding space, while text tokens and quantized audio output tokens are treated uniformly during generation. This architecture enables strong audio-text fusion, seamless multimodal generation, and compatibility with standard LLM training and inference infrastructure. For training, we meticulously curate audio-text datasets comprising 157.4B audio tokens and 320.5B text tokens. We apply multi-stage supervised training on these datasets, followed by text-only Cascade RL and multi-domain on-policy distillation. Audex delivers state-of-the-art audio understanding, speech recognition and translation, text-to-speech, audio generation, and speech-to-speech generation, while preserving very compelling reasoning, alignment, knowledge, long-context, and agentic capabilities of its text-only LLM backbone with marginal or no regression. We release the model checkpoints to facilitate open research.
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Paper page - Unified Audio Intelligence Without Regressing on Text Intelligence

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.05196 Authors:

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Abstract

A unified audio-text large language model is presented that integrates audio and text processing through a shared transformer decoder, achieving superior performance across multiple audio and speech tasks while maintaining strong text reasoning capabilities.

Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unifiedaudio-text LLMbuilt on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM. Audex adopts a simple unified design with a singleTransformer decoder: audio inputs are encoded and projected into the text embedding space, while text tokens and quantized audio output tokens are treated uniformly during generation. This architecture enables strong audio-text fusion, seamlessmultimodal generation, and compatibility with standard LLM training and inference infrastructure. For training, we meticulously curate audio-text datasets comprising 157.4B audio tokens and 320.5B text tokens. We apply multi-stagesupervised trainingon these datasets, followed by text-onlyCascade RLand multi-domainon-policy distillation. Audex delivers state-of-the-artaudio understanding,speech recognitionand translation,text-to-speech,audio generation, andspeech-to-speech generation, while preserving very compelling reasoning, alignment, knowledge, long-context, and agentic capabilities of its text-only LLM backbone with marginal or no regression. We release the model checkpoints to facilitate open research.

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#### nvidia/Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B Text Generation• Updatedabout 11 hours ago • 27 #### nvidia/Nemotron-Labs-Audex-2B Text Generation• Updatedabout 11 hours ago • 14

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