The paper investigates how to optimize non‑verbal vocalizations (NVs) such as laughter, coughs, and sighs in text‑to‑speech systems. It introduces a preference‑optimization framework that uses preference signals, pair construction, and DPO objectives, and defines an NV‑aware character error rate (NV‑CER) to guide controllable NV generation. Experiments on Emilia‑NV and NV‑Bench demonstrate that the proposed setup improves NV realization and lexical fidelity, with objective, LLM‑based, and human evaluations supporting the results.
By Haoyang Li, Chenglin Xu, Junchuan Zhao, Yuang Cao, Liumeng Xue, Yiwen Guo, Eng Siong Chng
arXiv:2609.14231v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Controllable synthesis of nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs) is es- sential for natural and expressive speech, but remains challeng- ing due to their aco...
By Ziyu Zhang, Yun Chen, Taihui Wang, Hanzhao Li, Qicong Xie, Rilin Chen, Zhixian Zhao, Lei Xie
arXiv:2602. 03420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content.
By Siyi Wang, Shihong Tan, Siyi Liu, Hong Jia, Gongping Huang, James Bailey, Ting Dang
arXiv:2606. 31729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-speech (TTS) evaluation is an open challenge.
By Dominika Woszczyk, Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Jura Miniota, \'Eva Sz\'ekely, Bjoern Schuller
arXiv:2609.01246v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are primarily optimized for written text, often producing outputs that are grammatically correct and helpful yet p...
By Thibaut Thonet, Jos Rozen, Laurent Besacier
The paper introduces Live-ProsodyJudge (LPJ), a cost‑effective pairwise evaluator distilled from Gemini for assessing fine‑grained prosody in live streaming TTS. It identifies a flaw called verdict coupling, where multi‑dimensional scores collapse into a single preference, and proposes Decoupled‑Live‑ProsodyJudge (D‑LPJ) to eliminate this issue through masking and a span‑local GRPO strategy. Experiments show LPJ outperforms a single Gemini call in accuracy, and D‑LPJ provides independent dimension judgments, achieving high alignment with human top‑3 selections in a TTS candidate tournament.
By Zifan Guan, Longyu Lu, Junan Zhang, Zhizheng Wu, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma
EmphTTS is a non‑autoregressive text‑to‑speech system that uses Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to train its duration predictor with an emphasis localization reward, allowing direct word‑level emphasis control. The system outperforms existing baselines in both objective emphasis evaluation and subjective preference tests, and ablation studies confirm that GRPO improves emphasis realization while reducing mismatch between the duration predictor and the TTS model.
By Zirui Li, Rech Silas, Lauri Juvela, Tom Backstrom, Mikko Kurimo
Chinese news text contains dense written forms such as scores, hyphenated model names, ranges, unit symbols, percentages, English abbreviations, and mixed Chinese-Latin-digit names. These forms are frequent in real listening workflows, and a text-to-speech (TTS) system can preserve the written string while changing the spoken meaning.
arXiv:2606. 26534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has enabled high-fidelity and expressive speech synthesis, but it often fails to imitate unseen speaking styles from uncommon scenarios (e.
By Tianxin Xie, Chenxing Li, Dong Yu, Li Liu
arXiv:2606. 15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent.
By Jialong Mai, Jinxin Ji, Xiaofen Xing, Wencui Liu, Xiangmin Xu
arXiv:2601.09050v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Tonal low-resource languages are widely spoken but remain underserved by modern speech technologies. A central challenge is learning speech represe...
By Tianyi Xu, Xuan Ouyang, Binwei Yao, Shoua Xiong, Sara Misurelli, Maichou Lor, Junjie Hu
arXiv:2608. 11590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human voice generation has made rapid progress in speech generation, singing voice generation, voice cloning, and voice editing.
By Haowei Lou, Hye-Young Paik, Dai Jia, Kai Li, Lina Yao