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