English

ClariNet: Parallel Wave Generation in End-to-End Text-to-Speech

Computation and Language 2019-02-25 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Sound Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

In this work, we propose a new solution for parallel wave generation by WaveNet. In contrast to parallel WaveNet (van den Oord et al., 2018), we distill a Gaussian inverse autoregressive flow from the autoregressive WaveNet by minimizing a regularized KL divergence between their highly-peaked output distributions. Our method computes the KL divergence in closed-form, which simplifies the training algorithm and provides very efficient distillation. In addition, we introduce the first text-to-wave neural architecture for speech synthesis, which is fully convolutional and enables fast end-to-end training from scratch. It significantly outperforms the previous pipeline that connects a text-to-spectrogram model to a separately trained WaveNet (Ping et al., 2018). We also successfully distill a parallel waveform synthesizer conditioned on the hidden representation in this end-to-end model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1807.07281,
  title  = {ClariNet: Parallel Wave Generation in End-to-End Text-to-Speech},
  author = {Wei Ping and Kainan Peng and Jitong Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.07281},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Published at ICLR 2019. (v3: add important details & discussion in Appendix A)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:06:59.730Z