제어 가능한 음성 합성을 위한 게이트 재귀 어텐션과 다변수 정보 최소화

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2021.8. 천성준.Speech is one the most useful interface that enables a person to communicate with distant others while using hands for other tasks. With the growing usage of speech interfaces in mobile devices, home appliances, and automobiles, the research on human-machine speech interface is expanding. This thesis deals with the speech synthesis which enable machines to generate speech. With the application of deep learning technology, the quality of synthesized speech has become similar to that of human speech, but natural style control is still a challenging task. In this thesis, we propose novel techniques for expressing various styles such as prosody and emotion, and for controlling the style of synthesized speech factor-by-factor. First, the conventional style control techniques which have proposed for speech synthesis systems are introduced. In order to control speaker identity, emotion, accent, prosody, we introduce the control method both for statistical parametric-based and deep learning-based speech synthesis systems. We propose a gated recurrent attention (GRA), a novel attention mechanism with a controllable gated recurence. GRA is suitable for learning various styles because it can control the recurrent state for attention corresponds to the location with two gates. By experiments, GRA was found to be more effective in transferring unseen styles, which implies that the GRA outperform in generalization to conventional techniques. We propose a multivariate information minimization method which disentangle three or more latent representations. We show that control factors can be disentangled by minimizing interactive dependency which can be expressed as a sum of mutual information upper bound terms. Since the upper bound estimate converges from the early training stage, there is little performance degradation due to auxiliary loss. The proposed technique is applied to train a text-to-speech synthesizer with multi-lingual, multi-speaker, and multi-style corpora. Subjective listening tests validate the proposed method can improve the synthesizer in terms of quality as well as controllability.음성은 사람이 손으로 다른 일을 하면서도, 멀리 떨어진 상대와 활용할 수 있는 가장 유용한 인터페이스 중 하나이다. 대부분의 사람이 생활에서 밀접하게 접하는 모바일 기기, 가전, 자동차 등에서 음성 인터페이스를 활용하게 되면서, 기계와 사람 간의 음성 인터페이스에 대한 연구가 날로 증가하고 있다. 본 논문은 기계가 음성을 만드는 과정인 음성 합성을 다룬다. 딥 러닝 기술이 적용되면서 합성된 음성의 품질은 사람의 음성과 유사해졌지만, 자연스러운 스타일의 제어는 아직도 도전적인 과제이다. 본 논문에서는 다양한 운율과 감정을 표현할 수 있는 음성을 합성하기 위한 기법들을 제안하며, 스타일을 요소별로 제어하여 손쉽게 원하는 스타일의 음성을 합성할 수 있도록 하는 기법을 제안한다. 먼저 음성 합성을 위해 제안된 기존 스타일 제어 기법들을 소개한다. 화자, 감정, 말투나, 음운 등을 제어하면서도 자연스러운 발화를 합성하고자 통계적 파라미터 음성 합성 시스템을 위해 제안된 기법들과, 딥러닝 기반 음성 합성 시스템을 위해 제안된 기법을 소개한다. 다음으로 두 시퀀스(sequence) 간의 관계를 학습하여, 입력 시퀀스에 따라 출력 시퀀스를 생성하는 어텐션(attention) 기법에 제어 가능한 재귀성을 추가한 게이트 재귀 어텐션(Gated Recurrent Attention) 를 제안한다. 게이트 재귀 어텐션은 일정한 입력에 대해 출력 위치에 따라 달라지는 다양한 출력을 두 개의 게이트를 통해 제어할 수 있어 다양한 스타일을 학습하는데 적합하다. 게이트 재귀 어텐션은 학습 데이터에 없었던 스타일을 학습하고 생성하는데 있어 기존 기법에 비해 자연스러움이나 스타일 유사도 면에서 높은 성능을 보이는 것을 실험을 통해 확인할 수 있었다. 다음으로 세 개 이상의 스타일 요소들의 상호의존성을 제거할 수 있는 기법을 제안한다. 여러개의 제어 요소들(factors)을 변수간 상호의존성 상한 항들의 합으로 나타내고, 이를 최소화하여 의존성을 제거할 수 있음을 보인다. 이 상한 추정치는 학습 초기에 수렴하여 0에 가깝게 유지되기 때문에, 손실함수를 더함으로써 생기는 성능 저하가 거의 없다. 제안하는 기법은 다언어, 다화자, 스타일 데이터베이스로 음성합성기를 학습하는데 활용된다. 15명의 음성 전문가들의 주관적인 듣기 평가를 통해 제안하는 기법이 합성기의 스타일 제어가능성을 높일 뿐만 아니라 합성음의 품질까지 높일 수 있음을 보인다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Evolution of Speech Synthesis Technology 1 1.2 Attention-based Speech Synthesis Systems 2 1.2.1 Tacotron 2 1.2.2 Deep Convolutional TTS 3 1.3 Non-autoregressive Speech Synthesis Systems 6 1.3.1 Glow-TTS 6 1.3.2 SpeedySpeech 8 1.4 Outline of the thesis 8 2 Style Modeling Techniques for Speech Synthesis 13 2.1 Introduction 13 2.2 Style Modeling Techniques for Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis 14 2.3 Style Modeling Techniques for Deep Learning-based Speech Synthesis 15 2.4 Summary 17 3 Gated Recurrent Attention for Multi-Style Speech Synthesis 19 3.1 Introduction 19 3.2 Related Works 20 3.2.1 Gated recurrent unit 20 3.2.2 Location-sensitive attention 22 3.3 Gated Recurrent Attention 24 3.4 Experiments and results 28 3.4.1 Tacotron2 with global style tokens 28 3.4.2 Decaying guided attention 29 3.4.3 Datasets and feature processing 30 3.4.4 Evaluation methods 32 3.4.5 Evaluation results 33 3.5 Guided attention and decaying guided attention 34 3.6 Summary 35 4 A Controllable Multi-lingual Multi-speaker Multi-style Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Multivariate Information Minimization 41 4.1 Introduction 41 4.2 Related Works 44 4.2.1 Disentanglement Studies for Speech Synthesis 44 4.2.2 Total Correlation and Mutual Information 45 4.2.3 CLUB:A Contrastive Log-ratio Upper Bound of Mutual Information 46 4.3 Proposed method 46 4.4 Experiments and Results 47 4.4.1 Quality and Naturalness of Speech 51 4.4.2 Speaker and style similarity 52 4.5 Summary 53 5 Conclusions 55 Bibliography 57 초 록 67 감사의 글 69박

Connectionist multivariate density-estimation and its application to speech synthesis

Autoregressive models factorize a multivariate joint probability distribution into a product of one-dimensional conditional distributions. The variables are assigned an ordering, and the conditional distribution of each variable modelled using all variables preceding it in that ordering as predictors. Calculating normalized probabilities and sampling has polynomial computational complexity under autoregressive models. Moreover, binary autoregressive models based on neural networks obtain statistical performances similar to that of some intractable models, like restricted Boltzmann machines, on several datasets. The use of autoregressive probability density estimators based on neural networks to model real-valued data, while proposed before, has never been properly investigated and reported. In this thesis we extend the formulation of neural autoregressive distribution estimators (NADE) to real-valued data; a model we call the real-valued neural autoregressive density estimator (RNADE). Its statistical performance on several datasets, including visual and auditory data, is reported and compared to that of other models. RNADE obtained higher test likelihoods than other tractable models, while retaining all the attractive computational properties of autoregressive models. However, autoregressive models are limited by the ordering of the variables inherent to their formulation. Marginalization and imputation tasks can only be solved analytically if the missing variables are at the end of the ordering. We present a new training technique that obtains a set of parameters that can be used for any ordering of the variables. By choosing a model with a convenient ordering of the dimensions at test time, it is possible to solve any marginalization and imputation tasks analytically. The same training procedure also makes it practical to train NADEs and RNADEs with several hidden layers. The resulting deep and tractable models display higher test likelihoods than the equivalent one-hidden-layer models for all the datasets tested. Ensembles of NADEs or RNADEs can be created inexpensively by combining models that share their parameters but differ in the ordering of the variables. These ensembles of autoregressive models obtain state-of-the-art statistical performances for several datasets. Finally, we demonstrate the application of RNADE to speech synthesis, and confirm that capturing the phone-conditional dependencies of acoustic features improves the quality of synthetic speech. Our model generates synthetic speech that was judged by naive listeners as being of higher quality than that generated by mixture density networks, which are considered a state-of-the-art synthesis techniqu

Modelling acoustic feature dependencies with artificial neural networks: Trajectory-RNADE

Given a transcription, sampling from a good model of acous-tic feature trajectories should result in plausible realizations of an utterance. However, samples from current probabilis-tic speech synthesis systems result in low quality synthetic speech. Henter et al. have demonstrated the need to capture the dependencies between acoustic features conditioned on the phonetic labels in order to obtain high quality synthetic speech. These dependencies are often ignored in neural network based acoustic models. We tackle this deficiency by introducing a probabilistic neural network model of acoustic trajectories, trajectory RNADE, able to capture these dependencies. Index Terms — Speech synthesis, artificial neural net-works, acoustic modelling, RNADE, trajectory mode

Efficient, end-to-end and self-supervised methods for speech processing and generation

Deep learning has affected the speech processing and generation fields in many directions. First, end-to-end architectures allow the direct injection and synthesis of waveform samples. Secondly, the exploration of efficient solutions allow to implement these systems in computationally restricted environments, like smartphones. Finally, the latest trends exploit audio-visual data with least supervision. In this thesis these three directions are explored. Firstly, we propose the use of recent pseudo-recurrent structures, like self-attention models and quasi-recurrent networks, to build acoustic models for text-to-speech. The proposed system, QLAD, turns out to synthesize faster on CPU and GPU than its recurrent counterpart whilst preserving the good synthesis quality level, which is competitive with state of the art vocoder-based models. Then, a generative adversarial network is proposed for speech enhancement, named SEGAN. This model works as a speech-to-speech conversion system in time-domain, where a single inference operation is needed for all samples to operate through a fully convolutional structure. This implies an increment in modeling efficiency with respect to other existing models, which are auto-regressive and also work in time-domain. SEGAN achieves prominent results in noise supression and preservation of speech naturalness and intelligibility when compared to the other classic and deep regression based systems. We also show that SEGAN is efficient in transferring its operations to new languages and noises. A SEGAN trained for English performs similarly to this language on Catalan and Korean with only 24 seconds of adaptation data. Finally, we unveil the generative capacity of the model to recover signals from several distortions. We hence propose the concept of generalized speech enhancement. First, the model proofs to be effective to recover voiced speech from whispered one. Then the model is scaled up to solve other distortions that require a recomposition of damaged parts of the signal, like extending the bandwidth or recovering lost temporal sections, among others. The model improves by including additional acoustic losses in a multi-task setup to impose a relevant perceptual weighting on the generated result. Moreover, a two-step training schedule is also proposed to stabilize the adversarial training after the addition of such losses, and both components boost SEGAN's performance across distortions.Finally, we propose a problem-agnostic speech encoder, named PASE, together with the framework to train it. PASE is a fully convolutional network that yields compact representations from speech waveforms. These representations contain abstract information like the speaker identity, the prosodic features or the spoken contents. A self-supervised framework is also proposed to train this encoder, which suposes a new step towards unsupervised learning for speech processing. Once the encoder is trained, it can be exported to solve different tasks that require speech as input. We first explore the performance of PASE codes to solve speaker recognition, emotion recognition and speech recognition. PASE works competitively well compared to well-designed classic features in these tasks, specially after some supervised adaptation. Finally, PASE also provides good descriptors of identity for multi-speaker modeling in text-to-speech, which is advantageous to model novel identities without retraining the model.L'aprenentatge profund ha afectat els camps de processament i generació de la parla en vàries direccions. Primer, les arquitectures fi-a-fi permeten la injecció i síntesi de mostres temporals directament. D'altra banda, amb l'exploració de solucions eficients permet l'aplicació d'aquests sistemes en entorns de computació restringida, com els telèfons intel·ligents. Finalment, les darreres tendències exploren les dades d'àudio i veu per derivar-ne representacions amb la mínima supervisió. En aquesta tesi precisament s'exploren aquestes tres direccions. Primer de tot, es proposa l'ús d'estructures pseudo-recurrents recents, com els models d’auto atenció i les xarxes quasi-recurrents, per a construir models acústics text-a-veu. Així, el sistema QLAD proposat en aquest treball sintetitza més ràpid en CPU i GPU que el seu homòleg recurrent, preservant el mateix nivell de qualitat de síntesi, competitiu amb l'estat de l'art en models basats en vocoder. A continuació es proposa un model de xarxa adversària generativa per a millora de veu, anomenat SEGAN. Aquest model fa conversions de veu-a-veu en temps amb una sola operació d'inferència sobre una estructura purament convolucional. Això implica un increment en l'eficiència respecte altres models existents auto regressius i que també treballen en el domini temporal. La SEGAN aconsegueix resultats prominents d'extracció de soroll i preservació de la naturalitat i la intel·ligibilitat de la veu comparat amb altres sistemes clàssics i models regressius basats en xarxes neuronals profundes en espectre. També es demostra que la SEGAN és eficient transferint les seves operacions a nous llenguatges i sorolls. Així, un model SEGAN entrenat en Anglès aconsegueix un rendiment comparable a aquesta llengua quan el transferim al català o al coreà amb només 24 segons de dades d'adaptació. Finalment, explorem l'ús de tota la capacitat generativa del model i l’apliquem a recuperació de senyals de veu malmeses per vàries distorsions severes. Això ho anomenem millora de la parla generalitzada. Primer, el model demostra ser efectiu per a la tasca de recuperació de senyal sonoritzat a partir de senyal xiuxiuejat. Posteriorment, el model escala a poder resoldre altres distorsions que requereixen una reconstrucció de parts del senyal que s’han malmès, com extensió d’ample de banda i recuperació de seccions temporals perdudes, entre d’altres. En aquesta última aplicació del model, el fet d’incloure funcions de pèrdua acústicament rellevants incrementa la naturalitat del resultat final, en una estructura multi-tasca que prediu característiques acústiques a la sortida de la xarxa discriminadora de la nostra GAN. També es proposa fer un entrenament en dues etapes del sistema SEGAN, el qual mostra un increment significatiu de l’equilibri en la sinèrgia adversària i la qualitat generada finalment després d’afegir les funcions acústiques. Finalment, proposem un codificador de veu agnòstic al problema, anomenat PASE, juntament amb el conjunt d’eines per entrenar-lo. El PASE és un sistema purament convolucional que crea representacions compactes de trames de veu. Aquestes representacions contenen informació abstracta com identitat del parlant, les característiques prosòdiques i els continguts lingüístics. També es proposa un entorn auto-supervisat multi-tasca per tal d’entrenar aquest sistema, el qual suposa un avenç en el terreny de l’aprenentatge no supervisat en l’àmbit del processament de la parla. Una vegada el codificador esta entrenat, es pot exportar per a solventar diferents tasques que requereixin tenir senyals de veu a l’entrada. Primer explorem el rendiment d’aquest codificador per a solventar tasques de reconeixement del parlant, de l’emoció i de la parla, mostrant-se efectiu especialment si s’ajusta la representació de manera supervisada amb un conjunt de dades d’adaptació.Postprint (published version

Efficient, end-to-end and self-supervised methods for speech processing and generation

Deep learning has affected the speech processing and generation fields in many directions. First, end-to-end architectures allow the direct injection and synthesis of waveform samples. Secondly, the exploration of efficient solutions allow to implement these systems in computationally restricted environments, like smartphones. Finally, the latest trends exploit audio-visual data with least supervision. In this thesis these three directions are explored. Firstly, we propose the use of recent pseudo-recurrent structures, like self-attention models and quasi-recurrent networks, to build acoustic models for text-to-speech. The proposed system, QLAD, turns out to synthesize faster on CPU and GPU than its recurrent counterpart whilst preserving the good synthesis quality level, which is competitive with state of the art vocoder-based models. Then, a generative adversarial network is proposed for speech enhancement, named SEGAN. This model works as a speech-to-speech conversion system in time-domain, where a single inference operation is needed for all samples to operate through a fully convolutional structure. This implies an increment in modeling efficiency with respect to other existing models, which are auto-regressive and also work in time-domain. SEGAN achieves prominent results in noise supression and preservation of speech naturalness and intelligibility when compared to the other classic and deep regression based systems. We also show that SEGAN is efficient in transferring its operations to new languages and noises. A SEGAN trained for English performs similarly to this language on Catalan and Korean with only 24 seconds of adaptation data. Finally, we unveil the generative capacity of the model to recover signals from several distortions. We hence propose the concept of generalized speech enhancement. First, the model proofs to be effective to recover voiced speech from whispered one. Then the model is scaled up to solve other distortions that require a recomposition of damaged parts of the signal, like extending the bandwidth or recovering lost temporal sections, among others. The model improves by including additional acoustic losses in a multi-task setup to impose a relevant perceptual weighting on the generated result. Moreover, a two-step training schedule is also proposed to stabilize the adversarial training after the addition of such losses, and both components boost SEGAN's performance across distortions.Finally, we propose a problem-agnostic speech encoder, named PASE, together with the framework to train it. PASE is a fully convolutional network that yields compact representations from speech waveforms. These representations contain abstract information like the speaker identity, the prosodic features or the spoken contents. A self-supervised framework is also proposed to train this encoder, which suposes a new step towards unsupervised learning for speech processing. Once the encoder is trained, it can be exported to solve different tasks that require speech as input. We first explore the performance of PASE codes to solve speaker recognition, emotion recognition and speech recognition. PASE works competitively well compared to well-designed classic features in these tasks, specially after some supervised adaptation. Finally, PASE also provides good descriptors of identity for multi-speaker modeling in text-to-speech, which is advantageous to model novel identities without retraining the model.L'aprenentatge profund ha afectat els camps de processament i generació de la parla en vàries direccions. Primer, les arquitectures fi-a-fi permeten la injecció i síntesi de mostres temporals directament. D'altra banda, amb l'exploració de solucions eficients permet l'aplicació d'aquests sistemes en entorns de computació restringida, com els telèfons intel·ligents. Finalment, les darreres tendències exploren les dades d'àudio i veu per derivar-ne representacions amb la mínima supervisió. En aquesta tesi precisament s'exploren aquestes tres direccions. Primer de tot, es proposa l'ús d'estructures pseudo-recurrents recents, com els models d’auto atenció i les xarxes quasi-recurrents, per a construir models acústics text-a-veu. Així, el sistema QLAD proposat en aquest treball sintetitza més ràpid en CPU i GPU que el seu homòleg recurrent, preservant el mateix nivell de qualitat de síntesi, competitiu amb l'estat de l'art en models basats en vocoder. A continuació es proposa un model de xarxa adversària generativa per a millora de veu, anomenat SEGAN. Aquest model fa conversions de veu-a-veu en temps amb una sola operació d'inferència sobre una estructura purament convolucional. Això implica un increment en l'eficiència respecte altres models existents auto regressius i que també treballen en el domini temporal. La SEGAN aconsegueix resultats prominents d'extracció de soroll i preservació de la naturalitat i la intel·ligibilitat de la veu comparat amb altres sistemes clàssics i models regressius basats en xarxes neuronals profundes en espectre. També es demostra que la SEGAN és eficient transferint les seves operacions a nous llenguatges i sorolls. Així, un model SEGAN entrenat en Anglès aconsegueix un rendiment comparable a aquesta llengua quan el transferim al català o al coreà amb només 24 segons de dades d'adaptació. Finalment, explorem l'ús de tota la capacitat generativa del model i l’apliquem a recuperació de senyals de veu malmeses per vàries distorsions severes. Això ho anomenem millora de la parla generalitzada. Primer, el model demostra ser efectiu per a la tasca de recuperació de senyal sonoritzat a partir de senyal xiuxiuejat. Posteriorment, el model escala a poder resoldre altres distorsions que requereixen una reconstrucció de parts del senyal que s’han malmès, com extensió d’ample de banda i recuperació de seccions temporals perdudes, entre d’altres. En aquesta última aplicació del model, el fet d’incloure funcions de pèrdua acústicament rellevants incrementa la naturalitat del resultat final, en una estructura multi-tasca que prediu característiques acústiques a la sortida de la xarxa discriminadora de la nostra GAN. També es proposa fer un entrenament en dues etapes del sistema SEGAN, el qual mostra un increment significatiu de l’equilibri en la sinèrgia adversària i la qualitat generada finalment després d’afegir les funcions acústiques. Finalment, proposem un codificador de veu agnòstic al problema, anomenat PASE, juntament amb el conjunt d’eines per entrenar-lo. El PASE és un sistema purament convolucional que crea representacions compactes de trames de veu. Aquestes representacions contenen informació abstracta com identitat del parlant, les característiques prosòdiques i els continguts lingüístics. També es proposa un entorn auto-supervisat multi-tasca per tal d’entrenar aquest sistema, el qual suposa un avenç en el terreny de l’aprenentatge no supervisat en l’àmbit del processament de la parla. Una vegada el codificador esta entrenat, es pot exportar per a solventar diferents tasques que requereixin tenir senyals de veu a l’entrada. Primer explorem el rendiment d’aquest codificador per a solventar tasques de reconeixement del parlant, de l’emoció i de la parla, mostrant-se efectiu especialment si s’ajusta la representació de manera supervisada amb un conjunt de dades d’adaptació