aiqbench analysis
Pixel-TTS introduces a novel architecture for text-to-speech synthesis by converting input text into images before processing, leveraging visual cues to handle unseen characters without expanding embedding matrices. This approach significantly improves robustness in cross-lingual scenarios while maintaining competitive performance and faster convergence compared to conventional character-independent methods. The technique represents a meaningful shift toward visually grounded speech models that enhance generalization capabilities for diverse orthographic variations.
Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech
arXiv:2606.14750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.
Abstract:Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.
Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Sound (cs.SD)
arXiv:2606.14750 [eess.AS]
(or arXiv:2606.14750v1 [eess.AS] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.14750 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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