ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2025

DualCodec: A Low-Frame-Rate, Semantically-Enhanced Neural Audio Codec for Speech Generation

Jiaqi Li, Xiaolong Lin, Zhekai Li, Shixi Huang, Yuancheng Wang, Chaoren Wang, Zhenpeng Zhan, Zhizheng Wu

Neural audio codecs form the foundational building blocks for language model (LM)-based speech generation. Typically, there is a trade-off between frame rate and audio quality. This study introduces a low-frame-rate, semantically enhanced codec model. Existing approaches distill semantically rich self-supervised (SSL) representations into the first-layer codec tokens. This work proposes DualCodec, a dual-stream encoding approach that integrates SSL and waveform representations within an end-to-end codec framework. In this setting, DualCodec enhances the semantic information in the first-layer codec and enables the codec system to maintain high audio quality while operating at a low frame rate. Note that a low-frame-rate codec improves the efficiency of speech generation. Experimental results on audio codec and speech generation tasks confirm the effectiveness of the proposed DualCodec compared to state-of-the-art codec systems, such as Mimi Codec, SpeechTokenizer, DAC, and Encodec.