Abstract:Recently, zero-shot TTS and VC methods have gained attention due to their practicality of being able to generate voices even unseen during training. Among these methods, zero-shot modifications of the VITS model have shown superior performance, while having useful properties inherited from VITS. However, the performance of VITS and VITS-based zero-shot models vary dramatically depending on how the losses are balanced. This can be problematic, as it requires a burdensome procedure of tuning loss balance hyper-parameters to find the optimal balance. In this work, we propose a novel framework that finds this optimum without search, by inducing the decoder of VITS-based models to its full reconstruction ability. With our framework, we show superior performance compared to baselines in zero-shot TTS and VC, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we show the robustness of our framework in various settings. We provide an explanation for the results in the discussion.
Abstract:Neural text-to-speech (TTS) models can synthesize natural human speech when trained on large amounts of transcribed speech. However, collecting such large-scale transcribed data is expensive. This paper proposes an unsupervised pre-training method for a sequence-to-sequence TTS model by leveraging large untranscribed speech data. With our pre-training, we can remarkably reduce the amount of paired transcribed data required to train the model for the target downstream TTS task. The main idea is to pre-train the model to reconstruct de-warped mel-spectrograms from warped ones, which may allow the model to learn proper temporal assignment relation between input and output sequences. In addition, we propose a data augmentation method that further improves the data efficiency in fine-tuning. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in low-resource language scenarios, achieving outstanding performance compared to competing methods. The code and audio samples are available at: https://github.com/cnaigithub/SpeechDewarping