| | --- |
| | license: apache-2.0 |
| | tags: |
| | - speech |
| | - codec |
| | - tokenizer |
| | --- |
| | --- |
| | # QuarkAudio-HCodec: A Unified Discrete Audio Tokenizer for High-Fidelity, Multitask Audio Generation |
| |
|
| | <p align="center"> |
| | <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20151"> |
| | <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Paper-ArXiv-red.svg" alt="Paper"> |
| | </a> |
| | <a href="https://github.com/alibaba/unified-audio/tree/main/QuarkAudio-HCodec/HCodec-2.0/"> |
| | <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-Code-green.svg" alt="GitHub"> |
| | </a> |
| | <a href="https://huggingface.co/QuarkAudio/QuarkAudio-HCodec/"> |
| | <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Model-Hugging%20Face-yellow.svg" alt="Hugging Face"> |
| | </a> |
| | <a href="https://www.modelscope.cn/models/QuarkAudio/QuarkAudio-HCodec/"> |
| | <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Model-%20%E9%AD%94%E6%90%AD-orange.svg" alt="ModelScope"> |
| | </a> |
| | </p> |
| | |
| | <p align="center"> |
| | <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20151"><img src="HCodec.jpg" width="70%" /></a> |
| | </p> |
| |
|
| | > π **H-Codec**: *A Unified, Dual-Stream Neural Audio Codec with Adaptive Frame Rate and 48kHz Support* |
| | > Enabling high-fidelity, efficient, and semantically rich audio tokenization for next-generation LLM-based audio generation. |
| |
|
| | π **Key Highlights**: |
| | - β
**Dual-Stream Tokenization**: Separately quantizes acoustic and semantic features into independent codebooks β preserving both signal fidelity and linguistic content. |
| | - π **Dynamic Frame Rate (H-Codec-1.5)**: Introduces an adaptive temporal resolution mechanism built upon H-Codec-1.0, enabling variable frame rates based on content complexity. |
| | - βοΈ **Multi-Sampling Rate (H-Codec-2.0)**: Extends the sampling rate from **16kHz to 48kHz** under a fixed frame rate, significantly improving audio fidelity and high-frequency detail preservation. |
| | - π **Unified Foundation**: Designed as a core component for multimodal LLMs, supporting diverse downstream tasks: TTS, VC, Editing, TTA, SE, and more. |
| |
|
| | π **Paper**: [arXiv:2510.26372](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20151) | π€ **Model**: [Hugging Face Spaces](https://huggingface.co/QuarkAudio/QuarkAudio-HCodec/) |
| |
|
| | --- |
| |
|
| | ## π¦ Overview |
| |
|
| | This project introduces **H-Codec**, a unified discrete audio tokenizer that integrates self-supervised learning (SSL) representations into the codec architecture to enable **dual-stream (acoustic + semantic) tokenization**. Unlike prior work that fuses modalities before quantization (e.g., X-Codec), H-Codec employs **separate codebooks** for acoustic and semantic streams, allowing independent optimization and better reconstruction quality. |
| |
|
| | We extend the original H-Codec (*aka* H-Codec-1.0) in *UniTok-Audio (Liu et al., 2025)* into two advanced variants: |
| |
|
| | | Version | Key Feature | Sampling Rate | Frame Rate | |
| | |---------------|----------------------------------|---------------|----------------| |
| | | **H-Codec-1.0** | Dual-stream quantization | 16 kHz | Fixed | |
| | | **H-Codec-1.5** | Dynamic frame rate adaptation | 16 kHz | Adaptive | |
| | | **H-Codec-2.0** | Full-bandwidth 48kHz support | 48 kHz | Fixed | |
| |
|
| | These improvements significantly enhance **audio fidelity**, **temporal efficiency**, and **applicability** across speech, music, and general audio. |
| |
|
| | π§ **Architecture Core Components**: |
| | 1. **Encoder**: Extracts continuous representations from waveform and SSL model (e.g., WavLM). |
| | 2. **Quantizer Module**: Two independent codebooks β one for acoustic details, one for semantic meaning. |
| | 3. **Decoder**: Reconstructs high-quality audio from discrete token sequences. |
| |
|
| | π‘ H-Codec is designed as a foundational module for **LLM-based audio generation**, seamlessly integrating with autoregressive language models for end-to-end training and inference. |
| |
|
| | <!-- --- |
| |
|
| | ## π§° Installation |
| |
|
| | ### Option 1: Using pip |
| |
|
| | ```bash |
| | pip install -r requirements.txt --> |
| | |
| | |
| | --- |
| | |
| | ## π― Quick Start: Run Inference in 3 Minutes |
| | |
| | ### 1. Clone Repository |
| | |
| | ```bash |
| | git clone https://github.com/alibaba/unified-audio.git |
| | cd QuarkAudio-HCodec-2.0 |
| | ``` |
| | |
| | ### 2. Create a Conda environment and install dependencies |
| | |
| | ```bash |
| | conda create -n unise python=3.10 |
| | conda activate unise |
| | pip install -r requirements.txt |
| | ``` |
| | |
| | ## 3. Tokenizer |
| | |
| | ```bash |
| | #!/bin/bash |
| | python audio_tokenizer.py |
| | ``` |