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Efficient audio representations in a compressed continuous latent space are critical for generative audio modeling and Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. However, some existing audio autoencoders have limitations, such as multi-stage…
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has transformed spoken dialog systems, yet the optimal architecture for real-time on-device voice agents remains an open question. While end-to-end approaches promise theoretical advantages,…
Audio and speech coding lack unified evaluation and open-source testing. Many candidate systems were evaluated on proprietary, non-reproducible, or small data, and machine learning-based codecs are often tested on datasets with similar…
Ultra-low-bitrate speech coding is pivotal for bandwidth-constrained communication and deep compression, yet maintaining naturalness and speaker identity at such extreme bit budgets remains challenging due to pronounced information loss and…
We propose an audio codec that addresses the low-delay requirements of some applications such as network music performance. The codec is based on the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) with very short frames and uses gain-shape…
Good speech quality has been achieved using waveform matching and parametric reconstruction coders. Recently developed very low bit rate generative codecs can reconstruct high quality wideband speech with bit streams less than 3 kb/s. These…
Neural audio signal codecs have attracted significant attention in recent years. In essence, the impressive low bitrate achieved by such encoders is enabled by learning an abstract representation that captures the properties of encoded…
We consider a multiterminal source coding problem in which a source is estimated at a central processing unit from lossy-compressed remote observations. Each lossy-encoded observation is produced by a remote sensor which obtains a noisy…
We propose Mobile Audio Streaming Networks (MASnet) for efficient low-latency speech enhancement, which is particularly suitable for mobile devices and other applications where computational capacity is a limitation. MASnet processes…
This paper proposes speaker-adaptive neural vocoders for parametric text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Recently proposed WaveNet-based neural vocoding systems successfully generate a time sequence of speech signal with an autoregressive…
Voice communication in bandwidth-constrained environments--maritime, satellite, and tactical networks--remains prohibitively expensive. Traditional codecs struggle below 1 kbps, while existing semantic approaches (STT-TTS) sacrifice prosody…
Existing low-bit Microscaling (MX) formats, such as MXFP4, often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation due to the use of a shared scaling factor with the Power-of-Two format. In this work, we explore strategies that introduce minimal…
Recently proposed speech recognition systems are designed to predict using representations generated by their top layers, employing greedy decoding which isolates each timestep from the rest of the sequence. Aiming for improved performance,…
Speech codecs are traditionally optimized for waveform fidelity, allocating bits to preserve acoustic detail even when much of it can be inferred from linguistic structure. This leads to inefficient compression and suboptimal performance on…
Voice conversion is an increasingly popular technology, and the growing number of real-time applications requires models with streaming conversion capabilities. Unlike typical (non-streaming) voice conversion, which can leverage the entire…
This paper aims to enhance low-resource TTS by reducing training data requirements using compact speech representations. A Multi-Stage Multi-Codebook (MSMC) VQ-GAN is trained to learn the representation, MSMCR, and decode it to waveforms.…
Over the past few years, speech enhancement methods based on deep learning have greatly surpassed traditional methods based on spectral subtraction and spectral estimation. Many of these new techniques operate directly in the the short-time…
We introduce the Speak & Improve Corpus 2025, a dataset of L2 learner English data with holistic scores and language error annotation, collected from open (spontaneous) speaking tests on the Speak & Improve learning platform. The aim of the…
The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) standard doubles the compression efficiency of the widely used H.264/AVC standard. For practical applications, rate control (RC) algorithms for HEVC need to be developed. Based on the R-Q,…
Although discrete speech tokens have exhibited strong potential for language model-based speech generation, their high bitrates and redundant timbre information restrict the development of such models. In this work, we propose LSCodec, a…