ZipCodec is a streaming neural speech codec that operates at an ultra‑low frame rate of 6.25 Hz and a bitrate of 0.80 kbps, achieving a theoretical latency of 160 ms. It leverages large‑scale WavLM distillation, a redesigned transformer architecture, a scalar spherical quantizer, and a latency‑aware streaming decoder to preserve reconstruction quality while reducing frame rate. Experiments demonstrate that ZipCodec outperforms existing streaming codecs at comparable bitrates in both reconstruction and downstream tasks, and it can run real‑time single‑stream inference on a consumer‑grade CPU despite having 842 M parameters.
Neural audio codecs are a fundamental component of modern speech generation systems. While recent codecs achieve increasingly low bitrates, reducing frame rate remains challenging, as each token must...
arXiv:2603.05887v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural audio codecs optimized for mel-spectrogram reconstruction often fail to preserve intelligibility. While semantic encoder distillation...
arXiv:2512.21653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech codecs are usually optimized for waveform fidelity, allocating bits to acoustic detail that can be inferred from linguistic structure....
arXiv:2603. 08683v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive "language" models (LMs) trained on raw waveforms can be repurposed for lossless audio compression, but prior work is limited to 8-bit audio, leaving open whether such approaches work for practical settings (16/24-bit) and can compete with existing codecs.
arXiv:2608.30927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whisper exposes speech through a fixed 1500-token encoder interface, now a default representation for ASR decoders and Whisper-based speech language...
arXiv:2608. 08569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in Speech Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding complex audio tasks.
arXiv:2606. 06743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The popularity of neural audio codecs as speech tokenizers has surged with the advent of Multimodal Large Language Models.
X-VC is a zero‑shot streaming voice conversion system that performs one‑step conversion directly in the latent space of a pretrained neural codec. It employs a dual‑conditioning acoustic converter that jointly models source codec latents and target acoustic conditions, while using adaptive normalization to inject utterance‑level speaker information. The model is trained with generated paired data and a role‑assignment strategy, and uses a chunkwise inference scheme with overlap smoothing to achieve low‑latency streaming inference, achieving superior WER, speaker similarity, and real‑time factor on the Seed‑TTS‑Eval benchmark.
arXiv:2608. 15369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lossy audio compression algorithms traditionally rely on psychoacoustic modeling and frequency-domain representations (e.
arXiv:2608. 05727v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Audio Codecs are widely adopted in speech generation and editing.
arXiv:2607. 29363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Balancing sequence length, representational capacity, and long-horizon stability is a central problem in autoregressive (AR) speech and audio generation.
arXiv:2606. 09019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Codec-based autoregressive (AR) speech language models have achieved strong text-to-speech (TTS) quality by modeling speech as sequences of discrete audio tokens with large pretrained backbones.