What is Residual Vector Quantization?

Data compression is crucial in today's digital world, as it enables efficient storage and transmission of information. Neural Compression techniques are emerging as a promising approach that leverages neural networks to represent, compress, and reconstruct data, aiming for high compression rates with minimal loss of perceptual information. In the audio domain, neural audio codecs based on Residual Vector Quantization have demonstrated superior performance in encoding audio signals across various bitrates. Key innovations like Google's SoundStream and EnCodec by Meta AI are proficient in compressing audio data while preserving quality. Neural Compression methods employ deep learning techniques to map data into more compact representations, such as vectors. This approach identifies patterns in the data and uses Residual Vector Quantization to break down the quantization process across multiple layers, improving compression efficiency without significantly increasing computational costs.