USM-VC: Mitigating Timbre Leakage with Universal Semantic Mapping Residual Block for Voice Conversion

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Auteurs principaux: Li, Na, Wang, Chuke, Gu, Yu, Li, Zhifeng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Na
Wang, Chuke
Gu, Yu
Li, Zhifeng
author_facet Li, Na
Wang, Chuke
Gu, Yu
Li, Zhifeng
contents Voice conversion (VC) transforms source speech into a target voice by preserving the content. However, timbre information from the source speaker is inherently embedded in the content representations, causing significant timbre leakage and reducing similarity to the target speaker. To address this, we introduce a Universal Semantic Matching (USM) residual block to a content extractor. The residual block consists of two weighted branches: 1) universal semantic dictionary based Content Feature Re-expression (CFR) module, supplying timbre-free content representation. 2) skip connection to the original content layer, providing complementary fine-grained information. In the CFR module, each dictionary entry in the universal semantic dictionary represents a phoneme class, computed statistically using speech from multiple speakers, creating a stable, speaker-independent semantic set. We introduce a CFR method to obtain timbre-free content representations by expressing each content frame as a weighted linear combination of dictionary entries using corresponding phoneme posteriors as weights. Extensive experiments across various VC frameworks demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates timbre leakage and significantly improves similarity to the target speaker.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08524
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle USM-VC: Mitigating Timbre Leakage with Universal Semantic Mapping Residual Block for Voice Conversion
Li, Na
Wang, Chuke
Gu, Yu
Li, Zhifeng
Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Voice conversion (VC) transforms source speech into a target voice by preserving the content. However, timbre information from the source speaker is inherently embedded in the content representations, causing significant timbre leakage and reducing similarity to the target speaker. To address this, we introduce a Universal Semantic Matching (USM) residual block to a content extractor. The residual block consists of two weighted branches: 1) universal semantic dictionary based Content Feature Re-expression (CFR) module, supplying timbre-free content representation. 2) skip connection to the original content layer, providing complementary fine-grained information. In the CFR module, each dictionary entry in the universal semantic dictionary represents a phoneme class, computed statistically using speech from multiple speakers, creating a stable, speaker-independent semantic set. We introduce a CFR method to obtain timbre-free content representations by expressing each content frame as a weighted linear combination of dictionary entries using corresponding phoneme posteriors as weights. Extensive experiments across various VC frameworks demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates timbre leakage and significantly improves similarity to the target speaker.
title USM-VC: Mitigating Timbre Leakage with Universal Semantic Mapping Residual Block for Voice Conversion
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08524