AKDQ: Adaptive Key-Delta Quantization for Low-Bitrate RVQ-Based Neural Speech Codecs

Low-bitrate speech coding is essential for bandwidth-constrained channels and on-device applications, but conventional residual vector quantization (RVQ)-based codecs employ a fixed number of codebooks per frame regardless of content. Adjacent speech frames often exhibit strong similarity, and quantizing them independently with the same scheme results in redundant encoding, thereby wasting bitrate. Therefore, we propose Adaptive Key-Delta Quantization (AKDQ), which replaces the fixed per-frame VQ allocation of RVQ with an adaptive frame-wise key-or-delta policy. AKDQ is a plug-in strategy that requires no modification to the codec's encoder–decoder backbone. Specifically, in AKDQ, each frame is classified as either a key-frame (K-frame) quantized with all VQs, or a delta-frame (D-frame) quantized with only a few VQs on a delta correction from the previous reconstruction, thereby reducing bitrate. The K/D decision is made by a budget-aware causal scheduler through a bit-bank mechanism, keeping the system streamable with no additional lookahead. Experiments on both causal and non-causal codec families demonstrate that AKDQ effectively reduces bitrate redundancy. For instance, on DAC, using AKDQ at 1.5 kbps achieves reconstruction quality comparable to using the baseline RVQ at 2.0 kbps, saving 25% of the bitrate.