# BridgeCodec: Mamba Enhanced Neural Audio Codec with Schr"odinger Bridge at Low Bitrate

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15453/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Speech and audio SSMs, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 29 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Speech and audio SSMs](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/speech-and-audio-ssms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Schr"odinger Bridge with Applications to Score-Based Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01357/) (2021)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [DNSMOS P.835: A Non-Intrusive Perceptual Objective Speech Quality Metric to Evaluate Noise Suppressors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01763/) (2021)
- [WavTokenizer: an Efficient Acoustic Discrete Codec Tokenizer for Audio Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16532/) (2024)
- [Codec Does Matter: Exploring the Semantic Shortcoming of Codec for Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17175/) (2024)
- [ICASSP 2022 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13288/) (2022)
- [Mamba in Speech: Towards an Alternative to Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12609/) (2024)
- [BigCodec: Pushing the Limits of Low-Bitrate Neural Speech Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05377/) (2024)
- [SemantiCodec: An Ultra Low Bitrate Semantic Audio Codec for General Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00233/) (2024)
- [Schrodinger Bridges Beat Diffusion Models on Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03491/) (2023)
- [XY-Tokenizer: Mitigating the Semantic-Acoustic Conflict in Low-Bitrate Speech Codecs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23325/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Capability of Mamba in Speech Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16808/) (2024)
- [Audio Super-Resolution with Latent Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17609/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Mamba in Speech Processing by Self-Supervised Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07273/) (2024)
- [Bridge-SR: Schr"odinger Bridge for Efficient SR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07897/) (2025)
- [Generative De-Quantization for Neural Speech Codec via Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08330/) (2023)
- [Few-step Adversarial Schr"odinger Bridge for Generative Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01460/) (2025)
- [Schr"odinger Bridge Mamba for One-Step Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16834/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural audio codecs achieve remarkable performance but operate as closed ecosystems with rigidly co-trained encoderdecoder pairs, severely hindering interoperability. To resolve this, we propose BridgeCodec, a versatile framework that decouples these pairs by translating latent representations between mismatched, frozen endpoints. We formulate this cross-codec translation as a Schr"odinger Bridge optimal transport problem, enabling robust mapping between disparate distributions without predefined noise priors. To efficiently capture longrange speech temporal dependencies, we integrate a Mambaenhanced U-Net architecture. We validate BridgeCodec on an extreme deployment scenario: mapping a lightweight 8 kHz source encoder directly to a 48 kHz target decoder at an ultralow bitrate of 1 kbps. Experimental results demonstrate that BridgeCodec achieves superior wideband reconstruction and high perceptual quality, successfully bridging heavily bottlenecked, heterogeneous codecs.