cs.SDOct 21, 2026

Closed-Loop Dual-Reference Guidance for Accent Control in Cross-Lingual Voice Cloning

Authors: Yuanzhong Zheng, Wei Huang, Ming Ma, Kailun Jin, Youhai Jiang

Organizations: VoxNexus, Singapore

Abstract

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 ⁣∗=0.33λ^{\!*}=0.33 reduces residual French LID mass by 73% versus direct cloning, at an ECAPA similarity cost of only 0.0420.042; relative to anchor-only cloning, it recovers 0.1550.155. The method achieves the lowest mean WER (0.0090.009) and highest mean GOP (4.7504.750) 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→\toVC cascade on speaker identity. Online RTF is approximately 26% lower than the cascade's (0.590.59 vs. 0.800.80), and the same setting reduces Spanish LID mass by 56% without re-tuning.

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