Title: MelCap: A Unified Single-Codebook Neural Codec for High-Fidelity Audio Compression
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Audio Codec, Tokenizer, Vocoder

Abstract: Neural audio codecs have recently emerged as powerful tools for high-quality and low-bitrate audio compression, leveraging deep generative models to learn latent representations of audio signals. However, existing approaches either rely on a single quantizer that only processes speech tasks, or on multiple quantizers that are not well suited for downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose MelCap, a high-fidelity neural codec with a single codebook. By decomposing audio reconstruction into two stages, our method preserves more acoustic details than previous single-codebook approaches, while achieving performance comparable to mainstream multi-codebook methods. In the first stage, audio is transformed into mel-spectrograms, which are compressed in the image domain and quantized into compact single tokens using a 2D tokenizer. A perceptual loss is further applied to mitigate the over-smoothing artifacts observed in spectrogram reconstruction. In the second stage, a Vocoder recovers waveforms from the mel discrete tokens in a single forward pass, enabling real-time decoding. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that MelCap achieves quality on comparable to state-of-the-art multi-codebook codecs, while retaining the computational simplicity of a single-codebook design, thereby providing an effective representation for downstream tasks.