arXiv AI

Voice "Cloning" is Style Transfer

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Your Voice Cloning System is Secretly a Voice Anonymizer

The paper demonstrates that the multilingual voice cloning model XTTSv2 can be repurposed for speaker anonymization without retraining. By conditioning on a pseudo-speaker and using an iterative refinement strategy, the authors balance privacy and intelligibility, achieving near‑optimal privacy (EER ≈ 0.49) and competitive speech quality across seven European languages. The method outperforms dedicated anonymization baselines and requires no language‑specific training.

By Romolo Muletta, Felix Matthias Saaro, Mark Cieliebak, Jan Deriu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

The Voiceprint Fallacy: Why Voices Are Not Unique Biometric Imprints

The article critiques the notion that a person's voice is a stable, unique biometric trace—termed a voiceprint—by reviewing historical, forensic, and technological evidence. It argues that voices are highly dynamic and context-dependent, and that the voiceprint metaphor misrepresents probabilistic speaker information as a fixed identity marker. The authors emphasize that speaker recognition should account for within-speaker variability, domain mismatch, and synthetic manipulation rather than rely on an assumed stable voiceprint.

By Tianle Yang, Cuiling Zhang, Chengzhe Sun, Siwei Lyu, Phil Rose
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Synthetic Speech, Real Signal: Paralinguistic Preservation and Cross-Lingual Augmentation via Voice Cloning

arXiv:2607. 22304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic data augmentation in speech is common practice for linguistic tasks like ASR, but has seen far less work for paralinguistic ones, especially clinical tasks where labelled data is expensive and some patient groups are underrepresented.

By Roseline Polle, Owen Parsons, George Fairs, Luis Miguel San Martin Fernandez, Cole Looney, Xiaoliang Wu, Alexandra Livia Georgescu, Stefano Goria
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Forget who you Forgot: Speaker Unlearning to Prevent Re-Identification in Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech

The paper introduces GUARD, a lightweight speaker identity unlearning framework designed to prevent re-identification in zero-shot text-to-speech systems. GUARD employs a learned speaker gate and speaker-agnostic activation steering on a frozen TTS backbone, optimizing steering vectors through group-relative reward optimization to reduce similarity to forgotten speakers while maintaining intelligibility and naturalness. Experiments on CosyVoice2 show that GUARD significantly lowers forget-speaker similarity and re-identification accuracy while preserving the ability to reproduce retained speakers.

By Hyoeun Kim, Yujun Lee, Kyuhong Shim
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 24

Synthetic Speech, Real Signal: Paralinguistic Preservation and Cross-Lingual Augmentation via Voice Cloning

Synthetic data augmentation in speech is common practice for linguistic tasks like ASR, but has seen far less work for paralinguistic ones, especially clinical tasks where labelled data is expensive and some patient groups are underrepresented. Voice cloning is one such augmentation approach, but is typically evaluated on speech intelligibility (WER) or speaker similarity (SS) rather than on downstream performance, and it remains unclear whether these preserve the paralinguistic signal such tasks depend on.