Wootaek Lim

Seokjin Lee, Minhan Kim, Seunghyeon Shin et al.

Deep generative models for audio synthesis have recently been significantly improved. However, the task of modeling raw-waveforms remains a difficult problem, especially for audio waveforms and music signals. Recently, the realtime audio variational autoencoder (RAVE) method was developed for high-quality audio waveform synthesis. The RAVE method is based on the variational autoencoder and utilizes the two-stage training strategy. Unfortunately, the RAVE model is limited in reproducing wide-pitch polyphonic music sound. Therefore, to enhance the reconstruction performance, we adopt the pitch activation data as an auxiliary information to the RAVE model. To handle the auxiliary information, we propose an enhanced RAVE model with a conditional variational autoencoder structure and an additional fully-connected layer. To evaluate the proposed structure, we conducted a listening experiment based on multiple stimulus tests with hidden references and an anchor (MUSHRA) with the MAESTRO. The obtained results indicate that the proposed model exhibits a more significant performance and stability improvement than the conventional RAVE model.

Anastasia Kuznetsova, Inseon Jang, Wootaek Lim et al.

Neural audio codecs, leveraging quantization algorithms, have significantly impacted various speech/audio tasks. While high-fidelity reconstruction is paramount for human perception, audio coding for machines (ACoM) prioritizes efficient compression and downstream task performance, disregarding perceptual nuances. This work introduces an efficient ACoM method that can compress and quantize any chosen intermediate feature representation of an already trained speech/audio downstream model. Our approach employs task-specific loss guidance alongside residual vector quantization (RVQ) losses, providing ultra-low bitrates (i.e., less than 200 bps) with a minimal loss of the downstream model performance. The resulting tokenizer is adaptable to various bitrates and model sizes for flexible deployment. Evaluated on automatic speech recognition and audio classification, our method demonstrates its efficacy and potential for broader task and architectural applicability through appropriate regularization.