USAD

USAD 2.0: Universal audio encoder scales to 1B parameters via representation distillation

USAD 2.0 is a new universal audio encoder that integrates knowledge from both self-supervised and supervised foundation models through domain-aware distillation, extending coverage to speech, music, and general audio domains. The model scales to one billion parameters via depth scaling and adds a second-stage supervised distillation step for downstream alignment with audio LLMs. Experiments report strong or state-of-the-art results across probing and LLM-based evaluations, addressing limitations of prior multi-domain encoders like USAD and SPEAR.