CodecSlime: Temporal Redundancy Compression of Neural Speech Codec via Dynamic Frame Rate

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Hankun, Guo, Yiwei, Shao, Chongtian, Li, Bohan, Yu, Kai
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wang, Hankun
Guo, Yiwei
Shao, Chongtian
Li, Bohan
Yu, Kai
author_facet Wang, Hankun
Guo, Yiwei
Shao, Chongtian
Li, Bohan
Yu, Kai
contents Neural speech codecs have been widely used in audio compression and various downstream tasks. Current mainstream codecs are fixed-frame-rate (FFR), which allocate the same number of tokens to every equal-duration slice. However, speech is inherently non-uniform in temporal information density. As a result, many tokens are wasted on steady-state segments like long vowels and silences. To address this mismatch, we present CodecSlime, a plugin-style method for compressing temporal redundancy through supporting dynamic frame rate (DFR) on neural speech codecs for the first time. Our method is unsupervised and architecture-agnostic, combining two key innovations, ScheDFR and Melt-and-Cool, for adapting inference and training, respectively. When integrated into a typical VQ-GAN codec backbone and operating at 40 Hz DFR ($\approx$ 600 bps), the reconstruction WER of CodecSlime is reduced by up to 32% relative to conventional FFR baselines with the same model architecture and similar bitrates, while other metrics are also competitive. CodecSlime also enables flexible trade-offs between reconstruction quality and bitrate: a single model supports inference at multiple frame rates and consistently outperforms FFR models at the corresponding frame rates. Audio samples are available at https://acadarmeria.github.io/codecslime/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_21074
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CodecSlime: Temporal Redundancy Compression of Neural Speech Codec via Dynamic Frame Rate
Wang, Hankun
Guo, Yiwei
Shao, Chongtian
Li, Bohan
Yu, Kai
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
Neural speech codecs have been widely used in audio compression and various downstream tasks. Current mainstream codecs are fixed-frame-rate (FFR), which allocate the same number of tokens to every equal-duration slice. However, speech is inherently non-uniform in temporal information density. As a result, many tokens are wasted on steady-state segments like long vowels and silences. To address this mismatch, we present CodecSlime, a plugin-style method for compressing temporal redundancy through supporting dynamic frame rate (DFR) on neural speech codecs for the first time. Our method is unsupervised and architecture-agnostic, combining two key innovations, ScheDFR and Melt-and-Cool, for adapting inference and training, respectively. When integrated into a typical VQ-GAN codec backbone and operating at 40 Hz DFR ($\approx$ 600 bps), the reconstruction WER of CodecSlime is reduced by up to 32% relative to conventional FFR baselines with the same model architecture and similar bitrates, while other metrics are also competitive. CodecSlime also enables flexible trade-offs between reconstruction quality and bitrate: a single model supports inference at multiple frame rates and consistently outperforms FFR models at the corresponding frame rates. Audio samples are available at https://acadarmeria.github.io/codecslime/.
title CodecSlime: Temporal Redundancy Compression of Neural Speech Codec via Dynamic Frame Rate
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21074