arXiv:2609.17509v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Neural audio codecs are a key component in speech language modeling. However, their high frame rates lead to long sequence lengths, increasing comput...
By Thanapat Trachu, Samuele Cornell, William Chen, Shinji Watanabe
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....
By Liuyang Bai, Weiyi Lu, Li Guo
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. Experiments demonstrate that ZipCodec outperforms existing streaming codecs at comparable bitrates in both reconstruction quality and downstream tasks, while remaining real‑time on a consumer‑grade CPU despite its 842 M parameters.
arXiv:2608. 08569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in Speech Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding complex audio tasks.
By Wenxu Jia, Dongjie Fu, Xize Cheng, Fangming Feng, Linjun Li, Wenshi Chen, Yingming Li, Zhou Zhao, Tao Jin
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.
By Yejin Lee, Junwon Moon, Hyoeun Kim, Hyunjin Choi, Heeseung Kim, Kyuhong Shim
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.
By Luca Della Libera, Cem Subakan, Mirco Ravanelli
arXiv:2602. 10230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Audio language models process input audio into rich frame-level representations, but the standard approach to temporal localization generates timestamps as sequences of text tokens, which discards the frame-level representations in favor of autoregressive decoding.
By Joseph An, Phillip Keung, Jiaqi Wang, Orevaoghene Ahia, Noah A. Smith
arXiv:2606. 27320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural audio autoencoders have become a core component of compression, feature extraction, and generation.
By Dimitrios Bralios, Paris Smaragdis, Minje Kim
arXiv:2606. 16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length.
By Alex Gichamba, Moise Busogi
arXiv:2511. 20973v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) deliver strong performance across speech and audio tasks, but their audio encoders generate high-rate token sequences (e.
By Saurabhchand Bhati, Samuel Thomas, Hilde Kuehne, Rogerio Feris, James Glass
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.
By Qixi Zheng, Yuxiang Zhao, Tianrui Wang, Wenxi Chen, Kele Xu, Yikang Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
PitchFlower is a flow‑based neural audio codec that offers explicit pitch controllability by flattening and randomly shifting F0 contours during training while conditioning on the true F0 to reconstruct the original audio. A vector‑quantization bottleneck blocks pitch recovery, and a flow‑based decoder produces high‑quality audio. Experiments demonstrate that PitchFlower matches DSP baselines in pitch accuracy, surpasses state‑of‑the‑art neural codecs in audio quality, and remains robust even when trained on WORLD‑transformed audio, effectively removing vocoder artifacts.
By Diego Torres, Axel Roebel, Nicolas Obin