Zero-shot cross-lingual voice cloning often carries the reference speaker's accent into the target language. We propose closed-loop dual-reference guidance, which pairs the original reference with a reusable native anchor constructed by voice conversion (VC). The references initialize separate language-model (LM) states that guide a shared acoustic trajectory; each completed patch then updates both states, keeping their generated histories aligned with the emitted speech. Anchor construction runs once per speaker, and online synthesis uses a frozen TTS model without per-utterance VC. On 20 held-out French speakers, the fixed setting λ∗=0.33 reduces residual French LID mass by 73% versus direct cloning, at an ECAPA similarity cost of only 0.042; relative to anchor-only cloning, it recovers 0.155. The method achieves the lowest mean WER (0.009) and highest mean GOP (4.750) among the held-out test arms. In blinded preference tests, native-English listeners favor it over direct cloning on pronunciation naturalness, and over both anchor-only cloning and a TTS→VC cascade on speaker identity. Online RTF is approximately 26% lower than the cascade's (0.59 vs. 0.80), and the same setting reduces Spanish LID mass by 56% without re-tuning.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Method overview. (a) Offline native-anchor construction: rFR and four native donors undergo zero-shot conversion once per speaker; the highest-similarity candidate is kept as rEN . (b) Closed-loop dual-reference guidance. At autoregressive step k , both reference-conditioned fields are evaluated on the same flow latent zk,t and combined via Eq. (1). After the ODE produces acoustic patch Zk , its encoding advances both LM contexts via Eq. (2). Shared generated history; distinct reference contexts and KV caches. (c) λ=0 is Arm A (accent leakage); λ=1 is Arm B (reduced speaker similarity); λ∗=0.33 is the selected operating point (Arm C).
WER ↓
P(fr)↓
P(en)↑
Speaker similarity ↑
GOP ↑
DNSMOS ↑
Arm
ECAPA
CAM++-EN
CAM++-CN ∗
A (Direct)
0.016
0.093
0.843
0.601
0.624
0.746
4.663
2.900
B (Anchor)
0.013
0.000
0.993
0.404
0.444
0.702
4.733
2.934
C (Proposed)
0.009
0.025
0.942
0.559
0.586
0.748
4.750
2.887
Cascade
0.047
0.001
0.985
0.468
0.492
0.770
4.378
3.026
Table 1: Main evaluation on held-out test data (20 French speakers × 20 texts × 3 seeds; n=1200 per arm, λ∗=0.33 ). Speaker-macro averages; bold values mark the best result in each column. P(fr) is residual French LID mass. ∗ CAM++-CN is Seed-VC’s internal speaker encoder (Sec. 6.2).
Figure 2: Accent–timbre trade-off on development (30 speakers). (a) ECAPA; (b) CAM++-EN. x : ΔSIM vs. A; y : ΔGOP vs. A. The shaded band is the 95% speaker-clustered bootstrap CI of ΔGOP . Orange: C (proposed) λ sweep; λ∗ is the selected operating point ( 0.33 ).
Figure 3: Residual source-language LID mass at λ∗=0.33 . Dumbbells: A → C reduction; B is the floor. Brackets give speaker-clustered 95% CIs of the paired difference Δ=C−A (negative values indicate a reduction under C).
Arm
DiT/patch
VC NFE
Lat. (s)
RTF
Peak VRAM (MiB)
(a) Direct cloning and cascade comparison
A
18
—
1.27
0.474
8239
C (velocity)
27
—
1.52
0.587
8235
Cascade
18
50
≈ 2.10
≈ 0.80
8563 / 1474 †
(b) Matched implementation comparison
C (velocity)
27
—
1.62
0.589
8406
Table 2: H100 80GB inference. (a) vs. direct cloning and cascade. (b) Matched velocity vs. conditioning ( μ -mix). TTS: 9-word text, five timed runs after warmup. DiT: batched branch evaluations per patch over nine nonzero Euler updates. † sequential cascade stages.
Comp.
Dim.
Pref. base
Pref. C
Tie
p
C vs. A
Accent / nat.
6.7 (4)
28.3 (17)
65.0 (39)
0.0057
C vs. B
Speaker sim.
5.0 (3)
65.0 (39)
30.0 (18)
<0.0001
C vs. Casc.
Accent / nat.
53.3 (32)
21.7 (13)
25.0 (15)
0.026
C vs. Casc.
Speaker sim.
8.3 (5)
63.3 (38)
28.3 (17)
<0.0001
C vs. A †
Speaker sim.
26.7 (16)
21.7 (13)
51.7 (31)
0.723
Table 3: Preferences on development speakers (7 evaluators × 60 sessions). % (sessions), majority vote. Bold: significantly preferred system. p : speaker-clustered sign-flip; pre-planned rows remain significant under Holm–Bonferroni. † Follow-up speaker-similarity comparison.
Config.
ECAPA ↑
CAM++-EN ↑
GOP ↑
WER ↓
P(fr)↓
A ( λ=0 )
0.517
0.589
4.602
0.020
0.153
B (anchor only)
0.308
0.378
4.770
0.009
0.001
C (velocity)
0.467
0.542
4.791
0.004
0.044
C (conditioning)
0.465
0.546
4.828
0.000
0.034
concat
0.372
0.459
4.743
0.003
0.003
open-KV
0.458
0.522
3.524
0.139
0.045
Table 4: Paired ablations on development (30 speakers, λ=0.33 , n=300 ).
In cross-lingual zero-shot text-to-speech, the accent of the reference leaks into the target speech. We propose accent analogy guidance (AAG), a training-free sampler term that subtracts an accent direction estimated from the model's own predictions for one synthetic voice rendered in both languages, so the voice cancels and only the accent remains. By a blind LLM accent judge on real dubbing data, reweighting classifier-free guidance between reference and text, and its variants, stay near one identity-accent trade-off curve; we score a method by its speaker similarity above that curve at equal accent (ΔSIM). Across four open TTS models AAG lies above the curve: on OmniVoice ΔSIM is +0.11 to +0.27 on three test sets (accent 3.51 to 4.28 on a 1-5 scale at speaker similarity 0.29, where reweighting keeps 0.02); MaskGCT and CosyVoice 2 also lie above their curves, and on F5-TTS it is more native than any reweighting setting. An LLM-free language-ID measure and a twelve-listener panel agree. A premise test and the reach of a model's own curve indicate in advance whether and roughly how much AAG can gain, predicting the one model where it gains nothing (X-Voice).
In this paper, we present X-Voice, a 0.4B multilingual zero-shot voice cloning model that clones arbitrary voices and enables everyone to speak 30 languages. X-Voice is trained on a 420K-hour multilingual corpus using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as a unified representation. To eliminate the reliance on prompt text without complex preprocessing like forced alignment, we design a two-stage training paradigm. In Stage 1, we establish X-Voices1 through standard conditional flow-matching training and use it to synthesize 10K hours of speaker-consistent segments as audio prompts. In Stage 2, we fine-tune on these audio pairs with prompt text masked to derive X-Voices2, which enables zero-shot voice cloning without requiring transcripts of audio prompts. Architecturally, we extend F5-TTS by implementing a dual-level injection of language identifiers and decoupling and scheduling of Classifier-Free Guidance to facilitate multilingual speech synthesis. Subjective and objective evaluation results demonstrate that X-Voice outperforms existing flow-matching based multilingual systems like LEMAS-TTS and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual cloning capabilities comparable to billion-scale models such as Qwen3-TTS. To facilitate research transparency and community advancement, we open-source all related resources.
Rixi Xu, Qingyu Liu, Haitao Li +10
1MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, X-LANCE Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University · 2Shanghai Innovation Institute +4
Preserving a speaker's voice identity while generating speech in a different language remains a fundamental challenge in spoken language technology, particularly in specialized domains such as scientific communication. In this paper, we address this challenge through our system submission to the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2026), the Cross-Lingual Voice Cloning shared task. First, we evaluate several state-of-the-art voice cloning models for cross-lingual speech generation of scientific texts in Arabic, Chinese, and French. Then, we build voice cloning systems based on the OmniVoice foundation model. We employ data augmentation via multi-model ensemble distillation from the ACL 60/60 corpus. We investigate the effect of using this synthetic data for fine-tuning, demonstrating improvements in intelligibility (WER & CER) and speaker similarity (SIM), with gains varying across languages.
Amanuel Gizachew Abebe, Yasmin Moslem
Shaggar Institute of Technology · Shaggar City, Ethiopia · Trinity College Dublin +1