# X-AuT: Progressive Audio-Encoder Compression for Speech LLMs with Cross-Scale Distillation

> Source: <https://aiflash.com/news/117455/>
> Published: 2026-09-11 06:30:13+00:00

Reducing audio-encoder depth lowers the inference cost of speech large language models, but removing complete blocks perturbs the embeddings consumed by the decoder and can cause deletion and premature end-of-sequence errors. We introduce X-AuT, a progressive framework that selects layer combination