| --- |
| license: apache-2.0 |
| tags: |
| - speech |
| - codec |
| - tokenizer |
| --- |
| --- |
| # QuarkAudio-HCodec: A Unified Discrete Audio Tokenizer for High-Fidelity, Multitask Audio Generation |
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| <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> |
|
|
| > 🔊 **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. |
|
|
| 🚀 **Key Highlights**: |
| - ✅ **Dual-Stream Tokenization**: Separately quantizes acoustic and semantic features into independent codebooks — preserving both signal fidelity and linguistic content. |
| - 🔄 **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. |
| - ⚙️ **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. |
| - 🌍 **Unified Foundation**: Designed as a core component for multimodal LLMs, supporting diverse downstream tasks: TTS, VC, Editing, TTA, SE, and more. |
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|
| 📄 **Paper**: [arXiv:2510.26372](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20151) | 🤗 **Model**: [Hugging Face Spaces](https://huggingface.co/QuarkAudio/QuarkAudio-HCodec/) |
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| --- |
|
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| ## 📦 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. |
|
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| We extend the original H-Codec (*aka* H-Codec-1.0) in *UniTok-Audio (Liu et al., 2025)* into two advanced variants: |
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|
| | 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 | |
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| These improvements significantly enhance **audio fidelity**, **temporal efficiency**, and **applicability** across speech, music, and general audio. |
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| 🔧 **Architecture Core Components**: |
| 1. **Encoder**: Extracts continuous representations from waveform and SSL model (e.g., WavLM). |
| 2. **Quantizer Module**: Two independent codebooks — one for acoustic details, one for semantic meaning. |
| 3. **Decoder**: Reconstructs high-quality audio from discrete token sequences. |
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| 💡 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. |
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|
| <!-- --- |
|
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| ## 🧰 Installation |
|
|
| ### Option 1: Using pip |
|
|
| ```bash |
| pip install -r requirements.txt --> |
| |
| |
| --- |
| |
| ## 🎯 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 |
| ``` |
