AIIC AI Intelligence Centre

SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Discrete vs. Continuous: A Comprehensive Study of Unified Audio Understanding in LALMs

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 19, 2026 · UTC

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) utilize either continuous features or discrete tokens, yet the optimal representation paradigm for general audio understanding remains debated. Existing benchmarks often focus on narrow domains or evaluate encoders outside LALM contexts. To address these gaps, we systematically evaluate continuous and discrete representations across speech, sound and music. Utilizing our UniARC framework with dual evaluation strategies across model scales from SmolLM2-135M to Llama-3-8B, we analyze the dynamic relationships of data volume, model capacity, and computational e

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType
paper
region
Global

Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-23T12:01:45.602Z. This is not the publication date.