JEPA as a Neural Tokenizer: Learning Robust Speech Representations with Density Adaptive Attention

Georgios Ioannides, Christos Constantinou, Aman Chadha, Aaron Elkins, Linsey Pang, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Yann LeCun

JEPA as a Neural Tokenizer: Learning Robust Speech Representations with Density Adaptive Attention: 2 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #28 of 32 papers on 2025-12-09. Day-by-day upvote history.

We introduce a two-stage self-supervised framework that combines the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) with a Density Adaptive Attention Mechanism (DAAM) for learning robust speech representations. Stage~1 uses JEPA with DAAM to learn semantic audio features via masked prediction in latent space, fully decoupled from waveform reconstruction. Stage~2 leverages these representations for efficient tokenization using Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) and a mixed-radix packing scheme, followed by high-fidelity waveform reconstruction with a HiFi-GAN decoder. By integrating Gaussian mixture-based density-adaptive gating into the JEPA encoder, the model performs adaptive temporal feature selection and discovers hierarchical speech structure at a low frame rate of 2.5~Hz. The resulting tokens (47.5 tokens/sec) provide a reversible, highly compressed, and language-model-friendly representation that is competitive with, and often more efficient than, existing neural audio codecs.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

Data: hysts-bot-data/daily-papers-stats and the Daily Papers API. Open data: tardellirs/paper-pulse-data. Sister project: Model Pulse, the download history of every model on the Hub.