arXiv AI
2d ago

GrainSpeech: Less Context, More Detail for Compact Speech Synthesis

GrainSpeech is a compact speech synthesis model that uses a fixed‑receptive‑field convolutional encoder to reduce pitch, energy, and duration prediction errors by 36.0%, 17.3%, and 3.4% respectively. It introduces a Mel‑specific gradient‑variance supervision that improves fine‑scale variation while avoiding quality degradation. With only 264.8K parameters, GrainSpeech achieves 17.9× real‑time Mel generation on a microcontroller and attains UTMOS scores comparable to much larger models, using less than 1.5% of their parameters.

By Zitao Liang, Chang Gao
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