Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2406.04633

Boosting Diffusion Model for Spectrogram Up-sampling in Text-to-speech: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Scaling text-to-speech (TTS) with autoregressive language model (LM) to large-scale datasets by quantizing waveform into discrete speech tokens is making great progress to capture the diversity and expressiveness in human speech, but the speech reconstruction quality from discrete speech token is far from satisfaction depending on the compressed speech token compression ratio. Generative diffusion models trained with score-matching loss and continuous normalized flow trained with flow-matching loss have become prominent in generation of images as well as speech. LM based TTS systems usually quantize speech into discrete tokens and generate these tokens autoregressively, and finally use a diffusion model to up sample coarse-grained speech tokens into fine-grained codec features or mel-spectrograms before reconstructing into waveforms with vocoder, which has a high latency and is not realistic for real time speech applications. In this paper, we systematically investigate varied diffusion models for up sampling stage, which is the main bottleneck for streaming synthesis of LM and diffusion-based architecture, we present the model architecture, objective and subjective metrics to show quality and efficiency improvement.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Chong Zhang, Yanqing Liu, Yang Zheng, Sheng Zhao. 2024-06-07. Boosting Diffusion Model for Spectrogram Up-sampling in Text-to-speech: An Empirical Study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04633

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Recovering the Zipfian Distribution in Unsupervised Term Discovery

Unsupervised term discovery involves segmenting unlabelled speech into word- or syllable-like units and clustering these into a lexicon of candidate types. True lexicons follow a Zipfian distribution, yet the dominant centre-based clustering approach -- K-means -- produces a more uniform distribution due to an inductive bias toward spherical clusters. In this paper we revisit graph-based clustering as a bottom-up alternative, where segment embeddings are connected by pairwise similarity and partitioned using the Leiden algorithm. We show that graph clustering substantially outperforms centre-based approaches (K-means, GMM, BIRCH) in both word- and syllable-level lexicon discovery across three languages, producing more Zipf-like distributions. Another bottom-up approach, agglomerative clustering with average linkage, also performs well, although it is computationally less efficient and allows for less control over the resulting distribution. Our work calls into question the dominance of centre-based clustering for term discovery, and promotes graph clustering as an attractive alternative.

eess.AS

Preserving Speech-to-Text LLM Capabilities in Speech-to-Speech Generation

Strong speech-to-text (S2T) LLMs already provide robust speech perception and text reasoning, but adding speech-to-speech (S2S) output is challenging: fine-tuning the backbone can degrade the original S2T performance, while attaching a downstream talker reintroduces a serial text-to-speech bottleneck. We present PRIME-Speech, a frozen-backbone S2S conversion framework that trains only speech-generation modules. PRIME-Speech synchronizes a causal audio post-decoder with intermediate hidden states of the frozen backbone, so codec tokens are generated from the model's evolving reasoning trajectory rather than from completed text chunks. The post-decoder uses mixed hidden-state, text, and audio-history conditioning, and a training-time packing strategy with turn-level audio KV-cache and position reset stabilizes multi-turn spoken interaction without additional multi-turn S2S training data. Multi-token prediction further reduces the effective codec prediction rate and improves first-audio latency without modifying the reasoning path. Across speech translation, spoken QA, speech understanding, and multi-turn dialogue, PRIME-Speech preserves the S2T behavior of the frozen backbone while producing accurate, low-WER spoken responses.

eess.AS

Brain2Speech-Net: Fast and Intelligible Brain-to-Speech Synthesis Without Text Decoding

The loss of speech limits communication for individuals with paralysis. Direct neural-to-speech synthesis is challenging due to the limited availability of neural data for training speech brain-computer interfaces. Most existing systems rely on cascaded neural-to-text-to-speech pipelines, which increase inference latency and propagate errors across stages. We present Brain2Speech-Net, a single-stage neural-to-speech generation framework without intermediate text decoding. We use a differentiable phoneme bottleneck and a deep-HMM alignment mechanism to map long neural recordings into the latent space of a text-to-speech (TTS) model, enabling high-quality speech synthesis. Brain2Speech-Net is the only system in our comparison that produces intelligible speech while generating faster than real time.

eess.AS