English

CodecFlow: Efficient Bandwidth Extension via Conditional Flow Matching in Neural Codec Latent Space

Sound 2026-03-04 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Speech Bandwidth Extension improves clarity and intelligibility by restoring/inferring appropriate high-frequency content for low-bandwidth speech. Existing methods often rely on spectrogram or waveform modeling, which can incur higher computational cost and have limited high-frequency fidelity. Neural audio codecs offer compact latent representations that better preserve acoustic detail, yet accurately recovering high-resolution latent information remains challenging due to representation mismatch. We present CodecFlow, a neural codec-based BWE framework that performs efficient speech reconstruction in a compact latent space. CodecFlow employs a voicing-aware conditional flow converter on continuous codec embeddings and a structure-constrained residual vector quantizer to improve latent alignment stability. Optimized end-to-end, CodecFlow achieves strong spectral fidelity and enhanced perceptual quality on 8 kHz to 16 kHz and 44.1 kHz speech BWE tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.02022,
  title  = {CodecFlow: Efficient Bandwidth Extension via Conditional Flow Matching in Neural Codec Latent Space},
  author = {Bowen Zhang and Junchuan Zhao and Ian McLoughlin and Ye Wang and A S Madhukumar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02022},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

7 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:59:28.516Z