PairAlign: A Framework for Autoregressive Tokenization via Self-Alignment with Applications to Audio Tokenization

Abstract:Modern learning systems represent perceptual signals with continuous vectors, but comparison, retrieval, memory, alignment, and reasoning are often symbolic. In language, tokens provide this interface; for speech and audio, it must be learned. Existing audio tokenizers rely on local quantization, clustering, or reconstruction, leaving sequence consistency, compactness, length, termination, and edit geometry only indirectly controlled. We introduce PairAlign, a framework for compact audio tokenization through autoregressive self-alignment. An encoder maps speech to a continuous condition, and an autoregressive decoder emits tokens from BOS to EOS. Given two content-preserving views, PairAlign derives a canonical anchor target and trains both views to predict it, with unrelated in-batch targets as competing sequences. It first learns an autoregressive bridge from VQ targets and then transitions to EMA-teacher self-alignment with grounding and anti-collapse controls. On 3 s speech, PairAlign produces shorter, non-degenerate sequences while retaining ordered paired-view consistency. On the TIMIT retrieval archive, it operates at 8.28 tokens/s, reducing archive token count by 70.65% and the edit-distance work proxy by 91.87% relative to Stage I. Positive-negative probes show strong separation across phone-disjoint, trigram-disjoint, and temporally rearranged negatives, while rate-controlled post-hoc BPE does not recover the same compactness-consistency operating point. These results expose a rate-granularity trade-off: PairAlign does not uniformly outperform denser tokenizers on every local metric, but provides a lower-rate symbolic interface preserving ordered and relational structure. Conceptually, PairAlign follows JEPA-style predictive learning by predicting an abstract target rather than reconstructing the input; here, the target is a learned variable-length symbolic sequence.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Sound (cs.SD); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)

arXiv:2605.06582 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2605.06582v4 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.06582 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.