StreamAlign: Streaming Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2609.09719 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Sep 2026]
Title:StreamAlign: Streaming Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization
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Abstract:Text-aligned speech tokenization methods have emerged to better align speech tokens with LLM token spaces, enabling more effective utilization of pretrained LLMs. However, they rely on offline automatic speech recognition (ASR), leading to two key limitations: (i) the need for complete utterances before tokenization, precluding real-time streaming, and (ii) vocabulary mismatch between ASR and LLMs, which reduces acoustic granularity from the subword to the word level. We introduce StreamAlign, a text-aligned speech tokenization framework that enables streaming tokenization for real-time speech-text joint modeling. StreamAlign performs online speech-text alignment by combining character-level RNN-Transducer alignment with word-level ASR guidance, mitigating ASR-LLM vocabulary mismatch while preserving recognition accuracy. A proactive word boundary classifier anticipates word completion at chunk boundaries, reducing tokenization latency from 560 ms to 270 ms. On LibriSpeech, StreamAlign achieves the lowest WER and highest UTMOS among evaluated tokenizers. Furthermore, StreamAlign-SLM, a spoken language model trained on StreamAlign units, outperforms other end-to-end spoken language models in speech continuation while achieving the strongest overall consistency on SALMon and spoken StoryCloze.
| Comments: | Findings of EMNLP 2026. Project page: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Sound (cs.SD); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.09719 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.09719v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09719
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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