2026
SACodec: Asymmetric Quantization with Semantic Anchoring for Low-Bitrate High-Fidelity Neural Speech Codecs
AAAI 2026technical
Neural Speech Codecs face a fundamental trade-off at low bitrates: preserving acoustic fidelity often compromises semantic richness. To address this, we introduce SACodec, a novel codec built upon an asymmetric dual-quantizer that employs our proposed Semantic Anchoring mechanism. This design strate