Xinsheng Wang

Xinsheng Wang, Mingqi Jiang, Ziyang Ma et al.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, existing foundation models rely on multi-stage processing or complex architectures for predicting multiple codebooks, limiting efficiency and integration flexibility. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Spark-TTS, a novel system powered by BiCodec, a single-stream speech codec that decomposes speech into two complementary token types: low-bitrate semantic tokens for linguistic content and fixed-length global tokens for speaker attributes. This disentangled representation, combined with the Qwen2.5 LLM and a chain-of-thought (CoT) generation approach, enables both coarse-grained control (e.g., gender, speaking style) and fine-grained adjustments (e.g., precise pitch values, speaking rate). To facilitate research in controllable TTS, we introduce VoxBox, a meticulously curated 100,000-hour dataset with comprehensive attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spark-TTS not only achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot voice cloning but also generates highly customizable voices that surpass the limitations of reference-based synthesis. Source code, pre-trained models, and audio samples are available at https://github.com/SparkAudio/Spark-TTS.

Yu Wang, Xinsheng Wang, Pengcheng Zhu et al.

This paper introduces Opencpop, a publicly available high-quality Mandarin singing corpus designed for singing voice synthesis (SVS). The corpus consists of 100 popular Mandarin songs performed by a female professional singer. Audio files are recorded with studio quality at a sampling rate of 44,100 Hz and the corresponding lyrics and musical scores are provided. All singing recordings have been phonetically annotated with phoneme boundaries and syllable (note) boundaries. To demonstrate the reliability of the released data and to provide a baseline for future research, we built baseline deep neural network-based SVS models and evaluated them with both objective metrics and subjective mean opinion score (MOS) measure. Experimental results show that the best SVS model trained on our database achieves 3.70 MOS, indicating the reliability of the provided corpus. Opencpop is released to the open-source community WeNet, and the corpus, as well as synthesized demos, can be found on the project homepage.

Yi Lei, Shan Yang, Xinsheng Wang et al.

Expressive synthetic speech is essential for many human-computer interaction and audio broadcast scenarios, and thus synthesizing expressive speech has attracted much attention in recent years. Previous methods performed the expressive speech synthesis either with explicit labels or with a fixed-length style embedding extracted from reference audio, both of which can only learn an average style and thus ignores the multi-scale nature of speech prosody. In this paper, we propose MsEmoTTS, a multi-scale emotional speech synthesis framework, to model the emotion from different levels. Specifically, the proposed method is a typical attention-based sequence-to-sequence model and with proposed three modules, including global-level emotion presenting module (GM), utterance-level emotion presenting module (UM), and local-level emotion presenting module (LM), to model the global emotion category, utterance-level emotion variation, and syllable-level emotion strength, respectively. In addition to modeling the emotion from different levels, the proposed method also allows us to synthesize emotional speech in different ways, i.e., transferring the emotion from reference audio, predicting the emotion from input text, and controlling the emotion strength manually. Extensive experiments conducted on a Chinese emotional speech corpus demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the compared reference audio-based and text-based emotional speech synthesis methods on the emotion transfer speech synthesis and text-based emotion prediction speech synthesis respectively. Besides, the experiments also show that the proposed method can control the emotion expressions flexibly. Detailed analysis shows the effectiveness of each module and the good design of the proposed method.

Qicong Xie, Tao Li, Xinsheng Wang et al.

In the existing cross-speaker style transfer task, a source speaker with multi-style recordings is necessary to provide the style for a target speaker. However, it is hard for one speaker to express all expected styles. In this paper, a more general task, which is to produce expressive speech by combining any styles and timbres from a multi-speaker corpus in which each speaker has a unique style, is proposed. To realize this task, a novel method is proposed. This method is a Tacotron2-based framework but with a fine-grained text-based prosody predicting module and a speaker identity controller. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully express a style of one speaker with the timber of another speaker bypassing the dependency on a single speaker's multi-style corpus. Moreover, the explicit prosody features used in the prosody predicting module can increase the diversity of synthetic speech by adjusting the value of prosody features.

Tao Li, Xinsheng Wang, Qicong Xie et al.

The cross-speaker emotion transfer task in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis particularly aims to synthesize speech for a target speaker with the emotion transferred from reference speech recorded by another (source) speaker. During the emotion transfer process, the identity information of the source speaker could also affect the synthesized results, resulting in the issue of speaker leakage. This paper proposes a new method with the aim to synthesize controllable emotional expressive speech and meanwhile maintain the target speaker's identity in the cross-speaker emotion TTS task. The proposed method is a Tacotron2-based framework with emotion embedding as the conditioning variable to provide emotion information. Two emotion disentangling modules are contained in our method to 1) get speaker-irrelevant and emotion-discriminative embedding, and 2) explicitly constrain the emotion and speaker identity of synthetic speech to be that as expected. Moreover, we present an intuitive method to control the emotion strength in the synthetic speech for the target speaker. Specifically, the learned emotion embedding is adjusted with a flexible scalar value, which allows controlling the emotion strength conveyed by the embedding. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a Mandarin disjoint corpus, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to synthesize reasonable emotional speech for the target speaker. Compared to the state-of-the-art reference embedding learned methods, our method gets the best performance on the cross-speaker emotion transfer task, indicating that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on learning the speaker-irrelevant emotion embedding. Furthermore, the strength ranking test and pitch trajectories plots demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively control the emotion strength, leading to prosody-diverse synthetic speech.

Xinsheng Wang, Siyuan Feng, Jihua Zhu et al.

This paper proposes a new model, referred to as the show and speak (SAS) model that, for the first time, is able to directly synthesize spoken descriptions of images, bypassing the need for any text or phonemes. The basic structure of SAS is an encoder-decoder architecture that takes an image as input and predicts the spectrogram of speech that describes this image. The final speech audio is obtained from the predicted spectrogram via WaveNet. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark database Flickr8k demonstrate that the proposed SAS is able to synthesize natural spoken descriptions for images, indicating that synthesizing spoken descriptions for images while bypassing text and phonemes is feasible.

Xinsheng Wang, Shanmin Pang, Jihua Zhu

In the generalized zero-shot learning, synthesizing unseen data with generative models has been the most popular method to address the imbalance of training data between seen and unseen classes. However, this method requires that the unseen semantic information is available during the training stage, and training generative models is not trivial. Given that the generator of these models can only be trained with seen classes, we argue that synthesizing unseen data may not be an ideal approach for addressing the domain shift caused by the imbalance of the training data. In this paper, we propose to realize the generalized zero-shot recognition in different domains. Thus, unseen (seen) classes can avoid the effect of the seen (unseen) classes. In practice, we propose a threshold and probabilistic distribution joint method to segment the testing instances into seen, unseen and uncertain domains. Moreover, the uncertain domain is further adjusted to alleviate the domain shift. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that the proposed method exhibits competitive performance compared with that based on generative models.

Ke Zhang, Yurong Guo, Xinsheng Wang et al.

The development of deep convolutional neural network architecture is critical to the improvement of image classification task performance. Many image classification studies use deep convolutional neural network and focus on modifying the network structure to improve image classification performance. Conversely, our study focuses on loss function design. Cross-entropy Loss (CEL) has been widely used for training deep convolutional neural network for the task of multi-class classification. Although CEL has been successfully implemented in several image classification tasks, it only focuses on the posterior probability of the correct class. For this reason, a negative log likelihood ratio loss (NLLR) was proposed to better differentiate between the correct class and the competing incorrect ones. However, during the training of the deep convolutional neural network, the value of NLLR is not always positive or negative, which severely affects the convergence of NLLR. Our proposed competing ratio loss (CRL) calculates the posterior probability ratio between the correct class and the competing incorrect classes to further enlarge the probability difference between the correct and incorrect classes. We added hyperparameters to CRL, thereby ensuring its value to be positive and that the update size of backpropagation is suitable for the CRL's fast convergence. To demonstrate the performance of CRL, we conducted experiments on general image classification tasks (CIFAR10/100, SVHN, ImageNet), the fine-grained image classification tasks (CUB200-2011 and Stanford Car), and the challenging face age estimation task (using Adience). Experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed loss function on different deep convolutional neural network architectures and different image classification tasks.

Ke Zhang, Xinsheng Wang, Yurong Guo et al.

The development of deep convolutional neural network architecture is critical to the improvement of image classification task performance. A lot of studies of image classification based on deep convolutional neural network focus on the network structure to improve the image classification performance. Contrary to these studies, we focus on the loss function. Cross-entropy Loss (CEL) is widely used for training a multi-class classification deep convolutional neural network. While CEL has been successfully implemented in image classification tasks, it only focuses on the posterior probability of correct class when the labels of training images are one-hot. It cannot be discriminated against the classes not belong to correct class (wrong classes) directly. In order to solve the problem of CEL, we propose Competing Ratio Loss (CRL), which calculates the posterior probability ratio between the correct class and competing wrong classes to better discriminate the correct class from competing wrong classes, increasing the difference between the negative log likelihood of the correct class and the negative log likelihood of competing wrong classes, widening the difference between the probability of the correct class and the probabilities of wrong classes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our loss function, we perform some sets of experiments on different types of image classification datasets, including CIFAR, SVHN, CUB200- 2011, Adience and ImageNet datasets. The experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of our loss function on different deep convolutional neural network architectures and different image classification tasks, such as fine-grained image classification, hard face age estimation and large-scale image classification.