arXiv AI

DiTAR+: Dual Optimization for Robust Autoregressive Diffusion Speech Synthesis

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Alignment-Free Text-Audiobox for Voice Dubbing and Full-Duplex Dialogue Synthesis

The paper introduces Alignment-Free Text‑Audiobox (Text‑AB), a unified diffusion‑based framework that performs high‑quality voice dubbing and full‑duplex dialogue synthesis without requiring forced alignment. Text‑AB uses a latent diffusion model with DAC‑VAE features, achieving over 10× compression compared to prior EnCodec representations, and learns text‑speech alignment via cross‑attention. The authors pretrain a 3B‑parameter model on 480k hours of monolingual speech and fine‑tune it for cross‑lingual dubbing, full‑duplex dialogue, and emotional dialogue, reporting significant improvements in prosody, voice similarity, naturalness, and emotional expressivity over existing internal systems.

By Sanyuan Chen, Min-Jae Hwang, Sho Inoue, Anna Sun, Bokai Yu, David Kant, Dongmin Hyun, Dorian Desblancs, Gregory Antonovsky, Oleg Repin, Peng-Jen Chen, Xutai Ma, Zehai Tu, Juan Pino, Wei-Ning Hsu
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Whisfusion: Parallel ASR Decoding with Masked Diffusion

arXiv:2508. 07048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) encoder-decoder models dominate high-quality multilingual ASR, but their left-to-right decoders make inference latency scale with transcript length.

By Taeyoun Kwon, Junhyuk Ahn, Taegeun Yun, Heeju Jwa, Yoonchae Choi, Siwon Park, Jongchan Kim, Hyungon Ryu, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Nam-Joon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

RobustSpeechFlow: Learning Robust Text-to-Speech Trajectories via Augmentation-based Contrastive Flow Matching

arXiv:2605. 22083v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While flow-matching text-to-speech (TTS) achieves strong zero-shot speaker similarity and naturalness, it remains susceptible to content fidelity issues, particularly skip and repeat errors from imperfect alignment.

By Jinhyeok Yang, Hyeongju Kim, Yechan Yu, Joon Byun, Frederik Bous, Juheon Lee
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

FireRedAudio: A General-Purpose Audio Language Model with Decoupled Continuous Representations for Understanding and Generation

FireRedAudio is a 9‑billion‑parameter audio language model that separates continuous input representations for audio understanding and speech generation, enabling a single autoregressive LLM to perform tasks such as ASR, zero‑shot TTS, Instruct TTS, and semantic/acoustic speech editing. The model uses a dedicated Audio Encoder for recognition and a RedAE‑based pathway for generation, with the LLM directly generating text or conditioning a flow‑matching DiT to produce acoustic latents. Evaluations show competitive or leading performance in multilingual ASR, content‑accurate zero‑shot TTS, strong instruction following, and significant improvements in speech editing over prior work.

By Feiyu Shen, Fenglong Xie, Junjie Li, Kun Xie, Lei Xie, Xu Tang, Xuelong Geng, Yan Jia, Yao Hu, Yichen Han, Yichen Wu, Ziqi Dai, Junjie Chen, Kai Huang, Manzhen Wei, Yixuan Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

SPAR-K: Scheduled Periodic Alternating Early Exit for Spoken Language Models

SPAR-K is a scheduled periodic alternating early‑exit framework for interleaved spoken language models that reduces decoding depth for speech tokens while maintaining quality. It lets most speech positions exit at a fixed intermediate layer and inserts periodic full‑depth refresh steps to counter distribution shift. Experiments on Step‑Audio‑2‑mini and GLM‑4‑Voice show up to 11 % depth reduction with less than 0.82 % drop in question‑answering accuracy and negligible impact on MOS and WER.

By Hsiao-Ying Huang, Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-yi Lee