Robust and Efficient Autoregressive Speech Synthesis with Dynamic Chunk-Wise Prediction Policy
Recently, autoregressive (AR) language models have become a dominant approach in speech synthesis, offering scalable training and expressive generation. However, conventional AR models based on next-token prediction struggle with long speech sequences, often failing to build stable frame-to-frame attention. This increases latency and degrades quality, limiting real-time applicability. To address this, we propose DCAR, a dynamic chunk-wise autoregressive speech synthesis framework that enhances efficiency and robustness in intelligibility. DCAR is trained with multi-token prediction, enabling variable-span chunk prediction via a lightweight on-policy module. By dynamically adjusting prediction spans, it reduces sequence-length dependency while preserving high synthesis quality. Experiments show that DCAR outperforms traditional next-token prediction models, achieving up to 72.27% intelligibility improvement and 2.61× inference speedup. Additional analyses demonstrate its potential as a versatile foundation for next-generation speech synthesis.
Authors
- Haoran Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5968-8845)
- Bohan Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1909-8995)
- Zhihan Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6290-6575)
- Xie Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4458-0753)
- Yiwei Guo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-8114-2085)
- Hankun Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0338-1809)
- Hanglei Zhang
Institutions
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2026-04-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp55912.2026.11460315
- Primary Topic
- Speech Recognition and Synthesis
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Research and Development