The 2025 LRAC Challenge
Table of Contents
Call for Participation
We invite you to participate in the 2025 Low-Resource Audio Codec (LRAC) Challenge, an exciting opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in neural audio coding for resource-constrained devices. This inaugural edition of the challenge will focus specifically on low-resource neural speech codecs designed to operate under everyday noise and reverberation conditions, while meeting strict constraints on computational complexity, latency, and bitrate.
See the PDF version of the Call for Participation: LRAC-Challenge-Call-for-Participation.pdf.
See also Call for Papers for the 2026 LRAC Workshop: LRAC-Workshop-Call-for-Papers.pdf – the associated satellite workshop at ICASSP 2026.
Motivation
The growing demand for speech interfaces across a wide range of resource-constrained environments—including embedded systems, mobile devices, and general-purpose computing platforms with limited processing or power budgets— requires speech codecs for real-time communication that are efficient in terms of compute, bitrate, and latency, while also delivering high-quality speech under real-world conditions. Although recent neural coding methods excel at optimizing for these constraints individually, addressing all three simultaneously remains an open challenge.
Aims
The first edition of the LRAC Challenge is aimed at reducing this gap and advancing the state-of-the-art by fostering research on neural speech codecs under joint resource constraints, including in realistic noise and reverberation. This edition will also explore the combination of speech enhancement and coding, provide datasets for crowdsourced evaluation of neural speech codecs to support comparable and reproducible research, and share insights into the effectiveness of objective metrics across real-world conditions.
The outcomes will be disseminated through an ICASSP 2026 Satellite Workshop on May 4, 2026 and via related publications.