arXiv AI By Nityanand Mathur, Hamees Sayed, Ayush Pratap Singh

Refinement Buys Intelligibility, Search Buys Identity: What Test-Time Compute Buys in Masked-Diffusion TTS

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The study investigates how two computational dimensions—model depth and refinement steps—affect intelligibility and speaker identity in masked-diffusion text‑to‑speech systems. Experiments with 15 models (19–133 M parameters) and up to 16 refinement steps show that refinement improves intelligibility more than identity, with a 1.86× asymmetry that persists even after retraining. Best‑of‑K search can recover identity when refinement fails, and analysis indicates that depth and steps target distinct bottlenecks, requiring separate optimization.

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