Autoregressive Variational Autoencoder with a Hidden Semi-Markov Model-Based Structured Attention for Speech Synthesis

This paper proposes an autoregressive speech synthesis model based on the variational autoencoder incorporating latent sequence representation for acoustic and linguistic features and the structure of a hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM). Although autoregressive models can provide efficient and accurate modeling of acoustic features, they have exposure bias, i.e., the mismatch between training (teacher-forcing) and inference (free-running). To overcome this problem, we introduce an autoregressive latent variable sequence, rather than using autoregressive generation of observations. Latent representation of alignment using HSMM-based structured attention mechanism enables the use of a completely consistent training algorithm for acoustic modeling with explicit duration models. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model outperformed baselines in subjective naturalness.