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

Wei Ping, Kainan Peng, Jitong Chen

Abstract: In this work, we propose a new solution for parallel wave generation by WaveNet. In contrast to parallel WaveNet (van 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: text-to-speech, deep generative models, end-to-end training, text to waveform

Code: [ 5 community implementations](https://paperswithcode.com/paper/?openreview=HklY120cYm)

Community Implementations: [ 5 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1807.07281/code)