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README.md

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+# U-Codec: Ultra Low Frame-rate Neural Speech Codec for Fast High-fidelity Speech Generation
+
+[![githubio](https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub.io-Demo_Page-blue?logo=Github&style=flat-square)](https://yangxusheng-yxs.github.io/U-Codec/)
+[![GitHub](https://img.shields.io/badge/Github-Code_Release-pink?logo=Github&style=flat-square)](https://github.com/YangXusheng-yxs/CodecFormer_5Hz)
+[![HuggingFace](https://img.shields.io/badge/HugginigFace-Stable_Release-blue?style=flat-square)](https://huggingface.co/shaunxsyang/U-Codec)
+
+
+### News
+This paper is currently under review. We have released the checkpoint of U-Codec (5Hz), which can be directly used for inference.
+
+
+### To do list
+- Provide the full training code for the U-Codec framework.
+
+- Release the public code of the TTS models built on top of U-Codec.
+
+If you are interested in U-Codec, feel free to contact us!
+## Overview
+
+We propose **U-Codec**, an **U**ltra low frame-rate neural speech **Codec** that achieves high-fidelity reconstruction and fast generation via an extremely frame-rate at 5Hz (5 frames per second). 
+Extreme compression at 5Hz typically leads to severe intelligibility and spectral detail loss, we overcome this by integrating a Transformer-based inter-frame long-term dependency module and systematically optimizing residual vector quantization (RVQ) depth and codebook size. 
+Moreover, we apply U-Codec into a large language model (LLM)-based auto-regressive TTS model, which leverages global and local hierarchical architecture to effectively capture dependencies across multi-layer tokens. 
+
+The overview of U-Codec as following picture shows.
+![The overview of UniAudio](fig/fig2.png)
+
+
+
+## How to inference U-Codec
+We provide an example to demonstrate how to run U-Codec (5Hz) for audio tokenization and reconstruction.
+### Environment Setup
+First, create a Python environment following a similar setup to [project page](https://github.com/yangdongchao/UniAudio).
+```
+conda create -n ucodec python=3.8
+conda init
+source ~/.bashrc
+conda activate ucodec
+```
+Then:
+```
+cd U-Codec
+bash requirements.sh
+```
+### Run Inference
+If you need pretrained weights, please download them on the [Checkpoint](https://huggingface.co/shaunxsyang/U-Codec).
+
+We provide an example script AudioTokenizer_UCodec.py for tokenizing audio into discrete codes and reconstructing audio from the codes.
+
+```
+cd tools/tokenizer/soundstream
+python AudioTokenizer_HY.py
+```
+
+You can directly use the released U-Codec 5Hz checkpoint for inference. More examples (e.g., TTS pipeline integration) will be released soon.
+
+
+### Citation
+If you find this code useful in your research, please cite our work and give us a star
+```bib
+@inproceedings{U-Codec,
+  title     = {U-Codec: Ultra Low Frame-rate Neural Speech Codec for Fast High-fidelity Speech Generation},
+  author    = {Xusheng Yang, Long Zhou, Wenfu Wang, Kai Hu, Shulin Feng, Chenxing Li, Meng Yu, Dong Yu, Yuexian Zou},
+  booktitle = {arXiv},
+  year      = {2025}
+}
+```
+
+### Contact us
+If you have any problem about the our code, please contact Xusheng (yangxs@stu.pku.edu.cn). 
+
+### License
+You can use the code under MIT license.