lin26d@interspeech_2026@ISCA

Total: 1

#1 BridgeCodec: Mamba Enhanced Neural Audio Codec with Schrödinger Bridge at Low Bitrate [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Zijian Lin, Jing Yang, Jinghao Luo, Zhuo Wang, Fan Fan, Zhiyong Wu

Neural audio codecs achieve remarkable performance but operate as closed ecosystems with rigidly co-trained encoder-decoder pairs, severely hindering interoperability. To resolve this, we propose BridgeCodec, a versatile framework that decouples these pairs by translating latent representations between mismatched, frozen endpoints. We formulate this cross-codec translation as a Schrödinger Bridge optimal transport problem, enabling robust mapping between disparate distributions without predefined noise priors. To efficiently capture long-range speech temporal dependencies, we integrate a Mamba-enhanced U-Net architecture. We validate BridgeCodec on an extreme deployment scenario: mapping a lightweight 8 kHz source encoder directly to a 48 kHz target decoder at an ultra-low bitrate of 1 kbps. Experimental results demonstrate that BridgeCodec achieves superior wideband reconstruction and high perceptual quality, successfully bridging heavily bottlenecked, heterogeneous codecs.

Subject: INTERSPEECH.2026 - Speech Processing