Ruby-OPD: Enhancing Pronunciation Controllability and Accuracy for Flow-Matching Text-to-Speech via On-Policy Distillation

Abstract:Achieving both high pronunciation accuracy and fine-grained controllability remains a central challenge in Japanese text-to-speech (TTS), as Japanese is an unsegmented language mixing logographic Kanji and phonographic Kana with extensive polyphony. Traditional cascaded systems convert text into phoneme sequences via a front-end, ensuring pronunciation control but discarding lexical semantics and prosodic cues in surface orthography. Conversely, recent zero-shot TTS models directly consume raw orthographic text to improve naturalness, yet suffer from polyphone errors and lack explicit pronunciation control. To bridge this gap, we propose a two-stage framework for flow-matching TTS. First, we investigate Ruby text representations with orthography perturbation to jointly preserve surface forms and target pronunciations for reliable control. Second, we introduce On-Policy Distillation (OPD) on large-scale text-only corpora to enhance pronunciation accuracy on raw orthographic text without paired speech. On the Joyo-Kanji-Yomi benchmark, our model achieves 97.13% Accuracy, 2.02% Target PER, 0.70% Sentence PER, and 4.21% Sentence CER under raw text while retaining strong controllability.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2611.06403 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2611.06403v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.06403 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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