cs.SDJun 25, 2026

Elastic Time: Dynamic Frame Rate Bottlenecks for Neural Audio Coding

Authors: Dimitrios BraliosParis SmaragdisMinje Kim

Organizations: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA · Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Abstract

Neural audio autoencoders have become a core component of compression, feature extraction, and generation. However, while existing systems support variable bitrate, the vast majority of models still operate at a fixed latent frame-rate, allocating equal temporal budget to regions with very different information density, which can result in unnecessarily long sequences. We introduce Elastic Time, a dynamic frame-rate bottleneck that converts fixed-frame-rate autoencoders to dynamic ones. Our method learns a lightweight latent predictor used to decide which frames can be skipped and later reconstructed, enabling efficient greedy boundary selection at inference. Experiments show our method enables deployment-time rate control while improving efficiency-quality tradeoffs relative to baselines. Overall, we provide a flexible mechanism for adjusting temporal resolution in audio autoencoders, potentially facilitating more efficient downstream modeling for generation and long-context tasks.

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