Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Andong, Lei, Tong, Chen, Rilin, Li, Kai, Yu, Meng, Li, Xiaodong, Yu, Dong, Zheng, Chengshi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07116
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917071013543936
author Li, Andong
Lei, Tong
Chen, Rilin
Li, Kai
Yu, Meng
Li, Xiaodong
Yu, Dong
Zheng, Chengshi
author_facet Li, Andong
Lei, Tong
Chen, Rilin
Li, Kai
Yu, Meng
Li, Xiaodong
Yu, Dong
Zheng, Chengshi
contents This paper revisits the neural vocoder task through the lens of audio restoration and propose a novel diffusion vocoder called BridgeVoC. Specifically, by rank analysis, we compare the rank characteristics of Mel-spectrum with other common acoustic degradation factors, and cast the vocoder task as a specialized case of audio restoration, where the range-space spectral (RSS) surrogate of the target spectrum acts as the degraded input. Based on that, we introduce the Schrodinger bridge framework for diffusion modeling, which defines the RSS and target spectrum as dual endpoints of the stochastic generation trajectory. Further, to fully utilize the hierarchical prior of subbands in the time-frequency (T-F) domain, we elaborately devise a novel subband-aware convolutional diffusion network as the data predictor, where subbands are divided following an uneven strategy, and convolutional-style attention module is employed with large kernels for efficient T-F contextual modeling. To enable single-step inference, we propose an omnidirectional distillation loss to facilitate effective information transfer from the teacher model to the student model, and the performance is improved by combining target-related and bijective consistency losses. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on various benchmarks and out-of-distribution datasets. Quantitative and qualitative results show that while enjoying fewer parameters, lower computational cost, and competitive inference speed, the proposed BridgeVoC yields stateof-the-art performance over existing advanced GAN-, DDPMand flow-matching-based baselines with only 4 sampling steps. And consistent superiority is still achieved with single-step inference.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07116
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BridgeVoC: Revitalizing Neural Vocoder from a Restoration Perspective
Li, Andong
Lei, Tong
Chen, Rilin
Li, Kai
Yu, Meng
Li, Xiaodong
Yu, Dong
Zheng, Chengshi
Sound
This paper revisits the neural vocoder task through the lens of audio restoration and propose a novel diffusion vocoder called BridgeVoC. Specifically, by rank analysis, we compare the rank characteristics of Mel-spectrum with other common acoustic degradation factors, and cast the vocoder task as a specialized case of audio restoration, where the range-space spectral (RSS) surrogate of the target spectrum acts as the degraded input. Based on that, we introduce the Schrodinger bridge framework for diffusion modeling, which defines the RSS and target spectrum as dual endpoints of the stochastic generation trajectory. Further, to fully utilize the hierarchical prior of subbands in the time-frequency (T-F) domain, we elaborately devise a novel subband-aware convolutional diffusion network as the data predictor, where subbands are divided following an uneven strategy, and convolutional-style attention module is employed with large kernels for efficient T-F contextual modeling. To enable single-step inference, we propose an omnidirectional distillation loss to facilitate effective information transfer from the teacher model to the student model, and the performance is improved by combining target-related and bijective consistency losses. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on various benchmarks and out-of-distribution datasets. Quantitative and qualitative results show that while enjoying fewer parameters, lower computational cost, and competitive inference speed, the proposed BridgeVoC yields stateof-the-art performance over existing advanced GAN-, DDPMand flow-matching-based baselines with only 4 sampling steps. And consistent superiority is still achieved with single-step inference.
title BridgeVoC: Revitalizing Neural Vocoder from a Restoration Perspective
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07116