One-shot personalization of autoregressive (AR) text-to-speech (TTS) models remains challenging because supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a single reference pair rapidly degrades generation quality. We identify fixed, off-policy supervision as a key cause of failure in one-shot SFT for AR TTS, leading to blank or near-empty outputs at inference. Diversifying the training data with zero-shot pseudo-pairs eliminates this failure but yields little improvement in speaker similarity and increases word error rate because the targets remain fixed and teacher-forced. We therefore propose two on-policy approaches for one-shot speaker personalization: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a speaker-similarity reward and On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) with soft supervision from a reference-conditioned teacher. Both on-policy methods improve speaker similarity while preserving intelligibility, with different trade-offs: GRPO achieves the strongest overall performance, whereas OPSD enables substantially faster adaptation without external reward evaluation. Further analysis confirms that these gains stem from on-policy supervision rather than target diversity, establishing on-policy training as an effective framework for one-shot AR TTS personalization.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of off-policy SFT and proposed on-policy methods for one-shot personalization of autoregressive TTS.
Method
WER (%) ↓
SIM ↑
t↓
vs. SFT
Zero-shot (ICL)
3.7
0.574
–
–
SFT
18.2
0.536
00 5.8
1.0 ×
SFT-LoRA
35.0
0.462
00 5.8
1.0 ×
SFT-ZSD
0 8.3
0.586
0 14.8
2.6 ×
OPSD-RO
0 4.9
0.608
0 35.3
6.1 ×
OPSD-TA
0 3.7
0.609
0 33.8
5.8 ×
Table 1: One-shot personalization results with LLaSA-1B on Seed-TTS-Eval. SFT-ZSD denotes Zero-Shot Distilled SFT; t denotes the adaptation time measured per training step in seconds, and vs. SFT reports the ratio of t relative to SFT.
Figure 2: Ratio of empty generations per training step.
Zero-Shot
SFT
OPSD-TA
GRPO
Ground Truth
NMOS ↑
3.83±0.16
3.42±0.21
3.80±0.15
3.87±0.15
4.38±0.09
Table 2: 5-scale NMOS (Naturalness Mean Opinion Score) with 95% CI, based on 120 evaluations from 93 evaluators.
Method
WER (%) ↓
SIM ↑
t↓
vs. SFT
OPSD-RO ( k=1 )
0 5.4
0.607
224.0
38.6 ×
OPSD-RO ( k=10 )
0 4.9
0.608
0 35.3
6.1 ×
OPSD-TA ( k=1 )
0 3.5
0.613
174.1
30.0 ×
OPSD-TA ( k=10 )
0 3.7
0.609
0 33.8
5.8 ×
Table 3: Effect of rollout reuse in OPSD on Seed-TTS-Eval. Each rollout batch is reused for k updates.
Autoregressive (AR) text-to-speech (TTS) models generate discrete speech tokens sequentially, which makes inference slow and can degrade robustness, since local errors propagate to later positions and can escalate into hallucination. This limitation stems from their left-to-right AR commitment: each token must be determined before future speech-token context is available. However, such ordering is not an inherent requirement for TTS, since the model receives the full input text before synthesis. In this paper, we introduce DELTA-TTS, a lightweight LoRA-based adaptation framework that converts a pretrained AR TTS model into a discrete diffusion language model (dLLM) for confidence-ordered speech-token decoding. To better capture the local structure of speech, DELTA-TTS incorporates a convolution module that injects local acoustic context, together with a 1/t-weighted training objective and a time-shifted inference schedule that together defer low-confidence positions to later steps. Trained on only 585 hours of LibriTTS, DELTA-TTS achieves a 1.75% WER on Seed-TTS test-en, outperforming its AR backbone while generating tokens 3.3 times faster. Further analysis shows that DELTA-TTS produces sharper text-speech alignment, increases overall decoding confidence, and mitigates the hallucinations observed in AR generation. Audio samples, inference code, and model weights are available at https://slpr-lab.github.io/DELTA-TTS.
Recently, zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has enabled high-fidelity and expressive speech synthesis, but it often fails to imitate unseen speaking styles from uncommon scenarios (e.g., crosstalk, dialects). Moreover, fine-tuning pretrained models requires large, high-quality datasets, limiting rapid personalization. We propose VoiceTTA, a reinforcement learning-based test-time adaptation (TTA) method that improves voice imitation of pretrained zero-shot TTS models. VoiceTTA introduces two style rewards based on coefficient-of-variation differences of F0 and energy, combined with speaker similarity and intelligibility (WER from a pretrained Whisper model), and optimizes learnable prefixes via group relative preference optimization (GRPO) in a flow matching-based model at inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements on uncommon speech prompts, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Audio samples are available at https://voicetta.pages.dev/
Tianxin Xie, Chenxing Li, Dong Yu +1
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Tencent
Recent full-stream text-to-speech (TTS) models enable low-latency personalized synthesis as input text arrives. However, sustaining generation beyond the lengths seen during training without additional training remains largely unexplored. We systematically analyze VoXtream2, which extends generation by periodically discarding past context while retaining the acoustic prompt. We find that this strategy does not prevent degradation: pronunciation accuracy deteriorates near the end of the training range due to the range of positions in which the model operates rather than the loss of past context, while speaker similarity gradually declines throughout generation. Based on these findings, we propose two training-free modifications that reduce the attention window and strengthen attention to the acoustic prompt. Experiments show that these modifications preserve pronunciation accuracy and speaker similarity throughout long-form generation while retaining the naturalness of the original model. Ablations further show complementary effects of the two modifications.
Jeseung Lim, Jiseong Woo, Heeseung Kim
Department of Physics, University of Seoul, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Department of AI, University of Seoul, Seoul, Republic of Korea