# MagiCodec: Simple Masked Gaussian-Injected Codec for High-Fidelity Reconstruction and Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00385/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Reconstruction vs. Generation: Taming Optimization Dilemma in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01423/) (2025)
- [UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02152/) (2022)
- [Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19737/) (2024)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [Masked Autoencoders that Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06405/) (2022)
- [Vocos: Closing the gap between time-domain and Fourier-based neural vocoders for high-quality audio synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00814/) (2023)
- [WavTokenizer: an Efficient Acoustic Discrete Codec Tokenizer for Audio Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16532/) (2024)
- [VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05370/) (2024)
- [Emotional Voice Conversion: Theory, Databases and ESD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14762/) (2021)
- [SpeechTokenizer: Unified Speech Tokenizer for Speech Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16692/) (2023)
- [Addressing Representation Collapse in Vector Quantized Models with One Linear Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02038/) (2024)
- [Improving the Diffusability of Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14831/) (2025)
- [ViSQOL v3: An Open Source Production Ready Objective Speech and Audio Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09584/) (2020)
- [Codec Does Matter: Exploring the Semantic Shortcoming of Codec for Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17175/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [LiveGesture Streamable Co-Speech Gesture Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10927/) (2026)
- [Beyond Fixed Frames: Dynamic Character-Aligned Speech Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23174/) (2026)
- [DiSTAR: Diffusion over a Scalable Token Autoregressive Representation for Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12210/) (2025)
- [WavCube: Unifying Speech Representation for Understanding and Generation via Semantic-Acoustic Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06407/) (2026)
- [Reconstruct! Don't Encode: Self-Supervised Representation Reconstruction Loss for High-Intelligibility and Low-Latency Streaming Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05887/) (2026)
- [WavTTS: Towards High-Quality Zero-Shot TTS via Direct Raw Waveform Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03455/) (2026)
- [StreamAlign: Streaming Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09719/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural audio codecs have made significant strides in efficiently mapping raw audio waveforms into discrete token representations, which are foundational for contemporary audio generative models. However, most existing codecs are optimized primarily for reconstruction quality, often at the expense of the downstream modelability of the encoded tokens. Motivated by the need to overcome this bottleneck, we introduce MagiCodec, a novel single-layer, streaming Transformer-based audio codec. MagiCodec is designed with a multistage training pipeline that incorporates Gaussian noise injection and latent regularization, explicitly targeting the enhancement of semantic expressiveness in the generated codes while preserving high reconstruction fidelity. We analytically derive the effect of noise injection in the frequency domain, demonstrating its efficacy in attenuating high-frequency components and fostering robust tokenization. Extensive experimental evaluations show that MagiCodec surpasses state-of-the-art codecs in both reconstruction quality and downstream tasks. Notably, the tokens produced by MagiCodec exhibit Zipf-like distributions, as observed in natural languages, thereby improving compatibility with language-model-based generative architectures. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Ereboas/MagiCodec.