2026
Self-Guidance: Enhancing Neural Codecs via Decoder Manifold Alignment
ICML 2026poster
Neural speech codecs based on Vector-Quantized VAEs (VQ-VAEs) are core audio tokenizers for speech LLMs, yet their reconstruction fidelity is bottlenecked by quantization error. Instead of modifying the quantizer or increasing model capacity—common approaches that complicate downstream language mode…