Shukjae Choi

Soumi Maiti, Yifan Peng, Shukjae Choi et al. · nvidia

We propose a decoder-only language model, VoxtLM, that can perform four tasks: speech recognition, speech synthesis, text generation, and speech continuation. VoxtLM integrates text vocabulary with discrete speech tokens from self-supervised speech features and uses special tokens to enable multitask learning. Compared to a single-task model, VoxtLM exhibits a significant improvement in speech synthesis, with improvements in both speech intelligibility from 28.9 to 5.6 and objective quality from 2.68 to 3.90. VoxtLM also improves speech generation and speech recognition performance over the single-task counterpart. Further, VoxtLM is trained with publicly available data and training recipes and model checkpoints are open-sourced to make fully reproducible work.

Tan Dat Nguyen, Ji-Hoon Kim, Jeongsoo Choi et al.

The goal of this paper is to accelerate codec-based speech synthesis systems with minimum sacrifice to speech quality. We propose an enhanced inference method that allows for flexible trade-offs between speed and quality during inference without requiring additional training. Our core idea is to predict multiple tokens per inference step of the AR module using multiple prediction heads, resulting in a linear reduction in synthesis time as the number of heads increases. Furthermore, we introduce a novel speculative decoding technique that utilises a Viterbi-based algorithm to select the optimal sequence of generated tokens at each decoding step. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the time required to predict each token is reduced by a factor of 4 to 5 compared to baseline models, with minimal quality trade-off or even improvement in terms of speech intelligibility. Audio samples are available at: multpletokensprediction.github.io/multipletokensprediction.github.io/.