Title: Learning latent representations for style control and transfer in end-to-end speech synthesis,
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to an
end-to-end speech synthesis model, to learn the latent representation of
speaking styles in an unsupervised manner. The style representation learned
through VAE shows good properties such as disentangling, scaling, and
combination, which makes it easy for style control. Style transfer can be
achieved in this framework by first inferring style representation through the
recognition network of VAE, then feeding it into TTS network to guide the style
in synthesizing speech. To avoid Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence collapse in
training, several techniques are adopted. Finally, the proposed model shows
good performance of style control and outperforms Global Style Token (GST)
model in ABX preference tests on style transfer.