# CleanCodec: Efficient and Robust Speech Tokenization via Perceptually Guided Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04418 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04418/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02152/) (2022)
- [FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00475/) (2020)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [WHAM!: Extending Speech Separation to Noisy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01160/) (2019)
- [Vocos: Closing the gap between time-domain and Fourier-based neural vocoders for high-quality audio synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00814/) (2023)
- [Pyroomacoustics: A Python package for audio room simulations and array processing algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04196/) (2017)
- [WavTokenizer: an Efficient Acoustic Discrete Codec Tokenizer for Audio Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16532/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-TTS Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15621/) (2026)
- [Attentive Statistics Pooling for Deep Speaker Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10963/) (2018)
- [AISHELL-3: A Multi-speaker Mandarin TTS Corpus and the Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11567/) (2020)
- [LibriTTS-R: A Restored Multi-Speaker Text-to-Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18802/) (2023)
- [UnivNet: A Neural Vocoder with Multi-Resolution Spectrogram Discriminators for High-Fidelity Waveform Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07889/) (2021)
- [Canary-1B-v2 & Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v3: Efficient and High-Performance Models for Multilingual ASR and AST](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14128/) (2025)
- [TorchAudio-Squim: Reference-less Speech Quality and Intelligibility measures in TorchAudio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01448/) (2023)
- [Scaling Transformers for Low-Bitrate High-Quality Speech Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19842/) (2024)
- [Reshape Dimensions Network for Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18223/) (2024)
- [Single-Codec: Single-Codebook Speech Codec towards High-Performance Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07422/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural audio codecs are a key component of speech processing pipelines, compressing audio into discrete tokens for downstream modeling. However, existing codecs struggle to balance reconstruction quality with token efficiency, often encoding perceptually irrelevant information such as background noise and recording artifacts at the expense of linguistically and acoustically meaningful content. We reframe audio tokenization as a selective information bottleneck problem and propose CleanCodec, a denoising audio codec which learns to encode only perceptually important features and discard imperceptible information. At just 12.5 tokens per second, CleanCodec achieves state-of-the-art tokenization efficiency, substantially outperforming existing codecs in speaker similarity and speech intelligibility. Evaluations on downstream text-to-speech and voice conversion tasks further demonstrate improved performance and up to 17x faster inference, highlighting significant efficiency gains.