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.
By Phillip Long, Zachary Novack, Chris Donahue
arXiv:2602. 15491v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural audio codecs (NACs) typically encode the short-term energy (gain) and normalized structure (shape) of speech/audio signals jointly within the same latent space.
By Samir Sadok, Laurent Girin, Xavier Alameda-Pineda
arXiv:2606. 00079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, but their deployment remains memory-intensive because all expert weights must be kept resident in memory.
By Jiayu Zhao, Zihan Teng, Minhao Fan, Tianrui Ma, Wentao Ren, Song Chen, Weichen Liu
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
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity.
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.