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VAD to the Bone: Ultra-Tiny Speech Activity Detection for Edge Deployment

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TL;DR - kiloVAD is a 2.1K-parameter, CNN-only voice activity detector designed for causal embedded inference. It achieves 0.850 AUC on AVA-Speech while using standard, deployment-friendly components.

  • Uses standard Mel features and avoids recurrent layers, learnable filterbanks, and non-causal post-processing.
  • Combines per-layer structured pruning with self-distillation.
  • Angle-based quantization-aware training improves results by 1–4% over standard QAT.
  • Operates with 200 ms of context under causal, per-frame evaluation.

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VAD to the Bone: Ultra-Tiny Speech Activity Detection for Edge Deployment

arXiv eess.AS Stephen Bauer, Sheila Seidel, Shanza Iftikhar, Scott Veidenheimer, Gorkem Ulkar 2026-07-28 arXiv:2607.25870
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-01 14:10:10.296731 UTC

TL;DR - kiloVAD is a 2.1K-parameter, CNN-only voice activity detector designed for causal embedded inference. It achieves 0.850 AUC on AVA-Speech while using standard, deployment-friendly components.

  • Uses standard Mel features and avoids recurrent layers, learnable filterbanks, and non-causal post-processing.
  • Combines per-layer structured pruning with self-distillation.
  • Angle-based quantization-aware training improves results by 1–4% over standard QAT.
  • Operates with 200 ms of context under causal, per-frame evaluation.
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