Title: DeCodec: Rethinking Audio Codecs as Universal Disentangled Representation Learners
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: neural codec, distangled representations, speech-background sound, semantic-paralinguistic

Abstract: Universal audio codecs learn entangled representations across audio types, whereas some specific codecs offer decoupled representations but are limited to speech. Real-world audio, however, often contains mixed speech and background sounds, and downstream tasks require selective access to these components. Therefore, we rethink the audio codec as an universal disentangled representation learner to enable controllable feature selection across different audio tasks. To this end, we introduce DeCodec, a novel neural codec that learns to decouple audio representations into orthogonal subspaces dedicated to speech and background sound, and within speech, representations are further decomposed into semantic and paralinguistic components. This hierarchical disentanglement allows flexible feature selection, making DeCodec a universal front-end for multiple audio applications. Technically, built upon a codec framework, DeCodec incorporates two key innovations: a subspace orthogonal projection module that factorizes the input into two decoupled orthogonal subspaces, and a representation swap training procedure that ensures these two subspaces are correlate to the speech and background sound, respectively. These allows parallel RVQs  to quantize speech and background sound components independently. Furthermore, we employ semantic guidance to the speech RVQ to achieve semantic and paralinguistic decomposition.
Experimental results show that DeCodec maintains advanced signal reconstruction while enabling new capabilities:  superior speech enhancement and effective one-shot voice conversion on noisy speech via representation recombination, improved ASR robustness through clean semantic representations, and controllable background sound preservation/suppression in TTS.