PhoenixCodec: Taming Neural Speech Coding For Extreme Low-Resource Scenarios

This paper presents PhoenixCodec, a comprehensive neural speech coding and decoding framework designed for extremely low-resource conditions. The proposed system integrates an optimized asymmetric frequency–time architecture, a Cyclical Calibration and Refinement (CCR) training strategy, and a noise-invariant fine-tuning procedure. Under stringent constraints—computation below 700 MFLOPs, latency less than 30 ms, and dual-rate support at 1 kbps and 6 kbps—existing methods face a trade-off between efficiency and quality. PhoenixCodec addresses these challenges by alleviating the resource-scattering of conventional decoders, employing CCR to enhance optimization stability, and enhancing robustness through noisy-sample fine-tuning. In the LRAC 2025 Challenge Track 1, the proposed system ranked third overall and demonstrated the best performance at 1 kbps in both real-world noise and reverberation and intelligibility in clean tests, confirming its effectiveness.