FlowMAC: Conditional Flow Matching for Audio Coding at Low Bit Rates
<|reference_start|>FlowMAC: Conditional Flow Matching for Audio Coding at Low Bit Rates: This paper introduces FlowMAC, a novel neural audio codec for high-quality general audio compression at low bit rates based on conditional flow matching (CFM). FlowMAC jointly learns a mel spectrogram encoder, quantizer and decoder. At inference time the decoder integrates a continuous normalizing flow via an ODE solver to generate a high-quality mel spectrogram. This is the first time that a CFM-based approach is applied to general audio coding, enabling a scalable, simple and memory efficient training. Our subjective evaluations show that FlowMAC at 3 kbps achieves similar quality as state-of-the-art GAN-based and DDPM-based neural audio codecs at double the bit rate. Moreover, FlowMAC offers a tunable inference pipeline, which permits to trade off complexity and quality. This enables real-time coding on CPU, while maintaining high perceptual quality.<|reference_end|>
@article{pia2024flowmac:,
    title={FlowMAC: Conditional Flow Matching for Audio Coding at Low Bit Rates},
    author={Nicola Pia and Martin Strauss and Markus Multrus and Bernd Edler},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17635},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2409.17635},
    primaryClass={eess.AS cs.LG cs.SD}
}