Zhikang Niu

Speech codecs that convert continuous speech signals into discrete tokens have become essential for speech language models. However, existing codecs struggle to balance high-quality reconstruction with semantically rich representations, limiting their effectiveness in both generative and understa...

Evaluating expressive speech remains challenging, as existing methods mainly assess emotional intensity and overlook whether a speech sample is expressively appropriate for its contextual setting. This limitation hinders reliable evaluation of speech systems used in narrative-driven and interacti...

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in Text-to-Audio Generation (TTA), providing sound creators with powerful tools to transform inspirations into vivid audio. Yet despite these advances, current TTA systems often suffer from slow inference speed, which greatly hinders the efficiency...