Papers for

media streaming services

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Neural audio codecs reveal traces of older compression methods

Tracing the Origins: Legacy Codec Identification in Neural Audio Transcoding

Abstract: Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ)-based neural audio codecs (NACs) enable high-fidelity audio distribution at unprecedentedly low bitrates through discrete token-based representations. However, this shift disrupts traditional forensics, as non-linear neural transcoding obscures the underlying traces of legacy compression. This study defines the forensic gap and proposes a Transformer-based framework designed to leverage the hierarchical and temporal dependencies inherent in RVQ sequences. By modeling inter-layer causal relationships and dynamic forensic significance, our model effectively disentangles superimposed artifacts from legacy-to-neural transcoding. Experimental results achieve 97%+ accuracy for codec identification and robust joint identification performance across 32-128 kbps. These results demonstrate that traditional codec traces persist even after neural transcoding, supporting the feasibility and necessity of neural-codec-aware audio forensics.

Mon 14 SeptSoundMultimedia
The gist
Audio files are often compressed to save space, but new neural audio codecs change how this is done. This makes it hard to tell what older compression methods were used before. The authors created a model that can look at how the new neural codecs work and figure out the old compression methods used earlier. Their method works very accurately, showing that old compression leaves behind hidden clues even after new processing.
Open 2609.14916v1