Organizations: Shenzhen Pimei Technology Co., Ltd., Guangdong, China · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Suzhou, China · State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
The ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS Challenge requires TTS systems to generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning from dialogue history before synthesizing contextually appropriate speech. While the official baseline establishes a unified architecture, it remains constrained by limited contextual comprehension, weak instruction fidelity, and suboptimal audio quality. We present a systematic optimization pipeline to address these limitations. First, we develop a data process framework that cleans raw data via FullSubNet denoising, Qwen3-ASR re-transcription, and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-based history-CoT consistency analysis, while distilling 545K high-fidelity instruction samples using Qwen3-TTS and Seed-VC under strict quality filtration. Second, we propose a Context-Aware Direct Preference Optimization (CA-DPO) method. By employing a cascaded filtering strategy, ASR prescreening, LLM tournament ranking, and speaker similarity verification, we obtain high-confidence preference pairs that significantly enhance holistic ``Context→CoT→Speech'' consistency during DPO training. Third, we establish an evaluation method featuring a 500-sample test set and an LLM-as-Judge framework to independently assess reasoning and execution fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms the baseline across all objective and subjective metrics, validating our data governance and alignment strategies.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline.
Figure 2: A Context-Aware Instruction-Following TTS Framework Based on the Official Baseline.
Model Stage
Objective Metrics
Gemini Evaluation (1–5)
Subjective Test (1–5)
WER ↓
SIM ↑
UTMOS ↑
C2I ↑
I2T ↑
Overall ↑
N-MOS ↑
S-MOS ↑
C2I-SC ↑
I2T-MOS ↑
Official Baseline
3.47
0.365
2.59
2.80
4.41
3.61
3.12 ± 0.21
2.05 ± 0.18
1.90 ± 0.15
2.72 ± 0.13
Stage 1: Continued Pre-training
w/ LoRA
3.39
0.364
2.64
2.87
4.52
3.70
3.15 ± 0.36
2.08 ± 0.14
1.95 ± 0.17
2.90 ± 0.19
w/ Full
3.31
0.371
2.66
2.83
4.56
3.73
3.18 ± 0.23
2.12 ± 0.11
2.02 ± 0.08
2.85 ± 0.17
Stage 2: Distillation SFT (on best Stage 1)
Table 1: Ablation study of the progressive training pipeline. We compare LoRA and full-parameter tuning at each stage, advancing the best variant. Objective (WER, SIM, UTMOS), LLM-as-Judge (1–5), and subjective scores (mean ± std) are reported, with best results in bold .
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China · JIUTIAN Research, China Mobile, Beijing, China · The State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University, Beijing, China +2
Graduate Institute of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan · Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan · NVIDIA Research 4 Artificial Intelligence Center of Research Excellence, National Taiwan University, Taiwan