Language models (LMs) have demonstrated the capability to handle a variety of generative tasks. This paper presents the UniAudio system, which, unlike prior task-specific approaches, leverages LMs techniques to generate multiple types of audio (including speech, sounds, music, and singing) with given input conditions. UniAudio 1) first tokenizes all types of target audio along with other condition modalities, 2) concatenates source-target pair as a single sequence, and 3) performs next-token prediction using LMs. Also, a multi-scale Transformer model is proposed to handle the overly long sequences caused by the residual vector quantization based neural codec in tokenization. Training of UniAudio is scaled up to 165K hours of audio and 1B parameters, based on all generative tasks, aiming to obtain sufficient prior knowledge not only in the intrinsic properties of audio but also the inter-relationship between audio and other modalities. Therefore, the trained UniAudio model has the potential to become a foundation model for universal audio generation: it shows strong capability in all trained tasks and can seamlessly support new audio generation tasks after simple fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that UniAudio achieves state-of-the-art or at least competitive results on most of the 11 tasks. Demo and code are released at https://github.com/yangdongchao/UniAudio

翻译：语言模型已展现出处理多种生成任务的能力。本文提出UniAudio系统，与以往针对特定任务的方法不同，该系统利用语言模型技术，在给定输入条件下生成多种类型的音频（包括语音、音效、音乐和歌声）。UniAudio首先将所有目标音频及其他条件模态进行分词处理，然后将源-目标配对拼接为单一序列，最后基于语言模型执行下一个词元预测。此外，本文提出一种多尺度Transformer模型，以处理由残差向量量化神经编解码器在分词过程中导致的过长序列。UniAudio的训练规模扩展至165K小时音频和1B参数，涵盖所有生成任务，旨在获取音频内在属性以及音频与其他模态之间相互关系的充分先验知识。因此，训练后的UniAudio模型有潜力成为通用音频生成的基础模型：它在所有训练任务中展现出强大的能力，并能通过简单微调无缝支持新的音频生成任务。实验表明，在11项任务中的大多数任务上，UniAudio取得了最先进或至少具有竞争力的结果。演示与代码已发布于https://github.com/yangdongchao/UniAudio。