LACE: Layer-Wise Compression for Dynamic Frame Rate Codecs
LACE introduces layer-wise compression for dynamic frame rate audio codecs, cutting sequence lengths and speeding TTS inference while preserving quality.
LACE (Layer-Adaptive Codec Encoding) applies an independent compression step at each quantization layer of a neural audio codec, enabling layer-specific segmentation boundaries instead of shared ones. Union alignment and boundary anchor mechanisms keep durations consistent for downstream text-to-speech. On LibriTTS, LACE achieves a better rate-quality tradeoff than prior dynamic frame rate codecs and improves TTS inference efficiency at competitive synthesis quality. Code is released in the ESPnet3 codec recipe.