We propose Relativistic Adversarial Feedback (RAF), a novel training objective for GAN vocoders that improves in-domain fidelity and generalization to unseen scenarios. Although modern GAN vocoders employ advanced architectures, their training objectives often fail to promote generalizable representations. RAF addresses this problem by leveraging speech self-supervised learning models to assist discriminators in evaluating sample quality, encouraging the generator to learn richer representations. Furthermore, we utilize relativistic pairing for real and fake waveforms to improve the modeling of the training data distribution. Experiments across multiple datasets show consistent gains in both objective and subjective metrics on GAN-based vocoders. Importantly, the RAF-trained BigVGAN-base outperforms the LSGAN-trained BigVGAN in perceptual quality using only 12% of the parameters. Comparative studies further confirm the effectiveness of RAF as a training framework for GAN vocoders.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overall framework of the RAF. (a) represents the process of deriving the non-separable discriminator gap and quality gap. (b) represents the training objectives for the generator and the discriminator. ϕ denotes the mel transformation. i denotes the data index.
Figure 2: An illustration of the effect of segment size on quality estimation error.
Figure 3: Toy experiments following [ 31 ] . (a), (b), and (c) represent the training process of MetricGAN-RAF-v1, MetricGAN-RAF-v2, and RAF for two-cluster data, respectively. True data are red, and fake data are blue. RAF escapes mode collapse more quickly than the other training objectives.
Model
Method
Training time (days)
Training steps
Signal fidelity
Perceptual quality
# Params
xRT ↑
M-STFT ↓
PESQ ↑
Periodicity ↓
V/UV F1 ↑
UTMOS ↑
SCOREQ
Full-ref ↓
No-ref ↑
BigVGAN-base
LSGAN
5.9
1 M
0.874
3.452
0.134
0.924
3.450
0.195
3.515
14.0
72
RAF
4.8
0.5 M
0.866
3.619
0.119
0.940
3.617
0.161
3.635
RAF
9.4
1 M
0.841
3.767
0.111
0.944
3.651
0.148
3.667
BigVGAN
LSGAN
11.9
1 M
0.822
3.824
0.110
0.944
3.509
0.180
3.556
112.4
44
Table 1: Objective evaluation results for LibriTTS-dev set. For models with † , we used the official checkpoints for inference.
Dataset
Model
M-STFT ↓
PESQ ↑
Periodicity ↓
F1 ↑
UTMOS ↑
SCOREQ Full-ref ↓
SCOREQ No-ref ↑
Vanilla GAN / RAF
Vanilla GAN / RAF
Vanilla GAN / RAF
Vanilla GAN / RAF
Vanilla GAN / RAF
Vanilla GAN / RAF
Vanilla GAN / RAF
LJSPEECH
BigVGAN-base
0.899 / 0.879
3.738 / 3.892
0.122 / 0.108
0.947 / 0.954
4.054 / 4.210
0.149 / 0.119
4.365 / 4.445
HiFi-GAN (v1)
1.162 / 1.052
2.923 / 3.276
0.146 / 0.127
0.935 / 0.943
3.826 / 4.031
0.227 / 0.163
4.192 / 4.330
Vocos
0.921 / 0.891
3.500 / 3.680
0.122 / 0.115
0.951 / 0.953
3.756 / 4.017
0.217 / 0.147
4.127/ 4.312
Deeply Korean
BigVGAN-base
0.924 / 0.884
2.921 / 3.312
0.170 / 0.150
0.951 / 0.962
1.297 / 1.294
0.256 / 0.227
0.887 / 0.881
HiFi-GAN (v1)
1.310 / 1.145
2.100 / 2.368
0.190 / 0.187
0.955 / 0.948
1.292 / 1.295
0.317 / 0.265
0.920 / 0.957
Table 2: Objective evaluation results for unseen datasets, grouped by dataset and model. Bold values indicate the higher score between the Vanilla GAN and RAF. Vanilla GAN refers to LSGAN for BigVGAN-base and HiFi-GAN (v1), and to HingeGAN for Vocos.
SMOS
LibriTTS
Deeply Korean
GT
4.804 ± 0.027
4.847 ± 0.032
LSGAN
4.526 ± 0.048
3.824 ± 0.090
RAF (Ours)
4.592 ± 0.044
4.324 ± 0.074
Table 3: 5-scale Similarity Mean Opinion Score results with 95% Confidence Interval on LibriTTS-test and Deeply Korean dataset with BigVGAN-base as a backbone.
Methods
PESQ ↑
UTMOS ↑
SCOREQ
Full-ref ↓
No-ref ↑
RAF (Ours)
3.493
3.515
0.183
3.557
w/o softplus
3.593
3.430
0.199
3.510
w [αW,αH,αM]=[1,1,1]
3.478
3.452
0.203
3.500
w/o H,W
3.665
2.872
0.434
2.934
Table 4: Ablation studies on the components of RAF on the LibriTTS-dev set with BigVGAN-base as a backbone.
Training objectives
Long
GP
PESQ ↑
UTMOS ↑
SCOREQ ↑
Full-ref ↓
No-ref ↑
LSGAN
✗
✗
3.117
3.185
0.264
3.302
HingeGAN
✗
✗
2.880
3.101
0.305
3.232
RpGAN-GP
✗
✓
3.176
3.297
0.259
3.359
LSGAN + Q recon
✗
✗
3.219
3.200
0.261
3.312
✓
✗
3.345
3.375
0.220
3.472
Table 5: A comparison result of GAN training objectives on LibriTTS-dev set using BigVGAN-base. MetricGAN-RAF-v2 is a modified version of MetricGAN for RAF.
Training objectives
Dataset
Seen
Unseen
LibriTTS
LJSPEECH
Deeply
UR
LSGAN+ Q recon
3.376
3.988
1.29
2.668
MetricGAN-RAF-v2
3.197
3.655
1.28
2.435
MetricGAN-RAF-v1
2.122
2.981
1.274
1.782
RpGAN-GP
3.297
3.823
1.314
2.56
Table 6: A comparison result of training objectives on multiple datasets. All objectives, except RpGAN-GP, were trained on long segments and with gradient penalties. RpGAN-GP was trained with gradient penalties.
A vocoder is a pivotal component of modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems. Despite the significant progress of neural network-based vocoders, accurate phase reconstruction remains the main challenge limiting both audio quality and modeling efficiency. We introduce PhaseGAN, a lightweight vocoder that addresses this limitation through a "mel → Amplitude → Phase" reconstruction pipeline. By reconstructing amplitude and phase spectra via distinct methodologies, the proposed PhaseGAN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while utilizing fewer model parameters and reduced computational requirements. The compact version generates high-fidelity audio with approximately 500K parameters and 1 GMAC computational load, making it highly suitable for real-time applications on edge devices. In addition, our approach exhibits exceptional musical audio synthesis capabilities despite no training on musical data, illustrating unprecedented cross-domain generalization. See https://github.com/phasegan/phasegan-audio-demo for demos of our work.
Wenzheng Zhang, Xueliang Zhang, Shulin He +7
College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, China
Latent audio generative models are typically trained in two stages: an audio codec is learned first, followed by a latent generative model. This decomposition leads to a decoder train-generation mismatch: the codec decoder is trained on encoder-induced latents but deployed on generator-produced latents at inference time. Across diverse datasets and latent generative models, we observe clear reconstruction-generation gaps under both FD and FAD, showing that strong reconstruction quality does not necessarily translate into strong end-to-end generation quality. A natural remedy is to adapt the decoder on generation-produced latents, but generated latents lack correspondence with source audio and therefore cannot directly provide the paired supervision used for decoder fine-tuning. We introduce AudioGAR, which constructs intermediate latents by perturbing encoder latents and denoising them through the frozen latent diffusion model. These latents form a trajectory from reconstruction toward generation, with lower-noise latents retaining source correspondence and supporting paired decoder fine-tuning. We fine-tune only the codec decoder on these latents, while keeping the codec encoder and latent generative model frozen. When applied to AudioX, AudioGAR substantially improves generative performance. It requires only 1.5% of the original training audio hours and 0.26% of the original training cost.
We present JoyAI-Voice~2.0, an end-to-end anthropomorphic speech generation model built upon a fully continuous, dual-encoder architecture. Raw speech is encoded into continuous latents and partitioned into patches. Each patch is decomposed by a semantic-acoustic dual encoder into a semantically purified representation and an acoustic representation, which are fused and jointly fed to a causal autoregressive Transformer for planning. The Transformer predicts the conditioning for the next patch, and a local diffusion Transformer renders its full latents for 48,kHz synthesis. The model is trained with a joint flow-matching and stop-prediction objective, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with DiffusionNFT to improve model performance. It achieves the lowest average word error rate of 2.51% on Seed-TTS, a 14.9% relative reduction over the strongest baseline, and state-of-the-art attribute fidelity on InstructTTSEval in both Chinese and English, leading on 5 of 10 perceptual dimensions with the highest overall score of 0.893 on MDVD-Eval.