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arXiv · 2512.00451

STCTS: Generative Semantic Compression for Ultra-Low Bitrate Speech via Explicit Text-Prosody-Timbre Decomposition

Siyu Wang·Haitao Li·Donglai Zhu
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Abstract

Voice communication in bandwidth-constrained environments--maritime, satellite, and tactical networks--remains prohibitively expensive. Traditional codecs struggle below 1 kbps, while existing semantic approaches (STT-TTS) sacrifice prosody and speaker identity. We present STCTS, a generative semantic compression framework enabling natural voice communication at 80 bps. STCTS explicitly decomposes speech into linguistic content, prosodic expression, and speaker timbre, applying tailored compression: context-aware text encoding (70 bps), sparse prosody transmission via TTS interpolation (<14 bps at 0.1-1 Hz), and amortized speaker embedding. Evaluations on LibriSpeech demonstrate a 75x bitrate reduction versus Opus (6 kbps) and 12x versus EnCodec (1 kbps), while maintaining perceptual quality (NISQA MOS > 4.26), graceful degradation under packet loss and noise resilience. We also discover a bimodal quality distribution with prosody sampling rate: sparse and dense updates both achieve high quality, while mid-range rates degrade due to perceptual discontinuities--guiding optimal configuration design. Beyond efficiency, our modular architecture supports privacy-preserving encryption, human-interpretable transmission, and flexible deployment on edge devices, offering a robust solution for ultra-low bandwidth scenarios.

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Siyu Wang, Haitao Li, Donglai Zhu. 2025-11-29. STCTS: Generative Semantic Compression for Ultra-Low Bitrate Speech via Explicit Text-Prosody-Timbre Decomposition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00451

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