SonoEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Pronunciation Correction in LLM-Based TTS

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Singh, Ayush Pratap, Singh, Harshit, Mathur, Nityanand, Mandloi, Akshat, Kamath, Sudarshan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Singh, Ayush Pratap
Singh, Harshit
Mathur, Nityanand
Mandloi, Akshat
Kamath, Sudarshan
author_facet Singh, Ayush Pratap
Singh, Harshit
Mathur, Nityanand
Mandloi, Akshat
Kamath, Sudarshan
contents Neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems systematically mispronounce low-resource proper nouns, particularly non-English names, brands, and geographic locations, due to their underrepresentation in predominantly English training corpora. Existing solutions typically rely on expensive multilingual data collection, supervised finetuning, or manual phonetic annotation, which limits the deployment of TTS systems in linguistically diverse settings. We introduce SonoEdit, a model editing technique that surgically corrects pronunciation errors in pre-trained TTS models without retraining. Instead of costly finetuning or explicit phoneme injection, we propose a parsimonious alternative based on Null-Space Pronunciation Editing, which performs a single-shot parameter update to modify the pronunciation of specific words while provably preserving all other model behavior. We first adapt Acoustic Causal Tracing to identify the Transformer layers responsible for text-to-pronunciation mapping. We then apply Null-Space Constrained Editing to compute a closed-form weight update that corrects the target pronunciation while remaining mathematically orthogonal to the subspace governing general speech generation. This constrained update steers the model's acoustic output toward a desired pronunciation exemplar while guaranteeing zero first-order change on a preserved speech corpus.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17086
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SonoEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Pronunciation Correction in LLM-Based TTS
Singh, Ayush Pratap
Singh, Harshit
Mathur, Nityanand
Mandloi, Akshat
Kamath, Sudarshan
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
Neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems systematically mispronounce low-resource proper nouns, particularly non-English names, brands, and geographic locations, due to their underrepresentation in predominantly English training corpora. Existing solutions typically rely on expensive multilingual data collection, supervised finetuning, or manual phonetic annotation, which limits the deployment of TTS systems in linguistically diverse settings. We introduce SonoEdit, a model editing technique that surgically corrects pronunciation errors in pre-trained TTS models without retraining. Instead of costly finetuning or explicit phoneme injection, we propose a parsimonious alternative based on Null-Space Pronunciation Editing, which performs a single-shot parameter update to modify the pronunciation of specific words while provably preserving all other model behavior. We first adapt Acoustic Causal Tracing to identify the Transformer layers responsible for text-to-pronunciation mapping. We then apply Null-Space Constrained Editing to compute a closed-form weight update that corrects the target pronunciation while remaining mathematically orthogonal to the subspace governing general speech generation. This constrained update steers the model's acoustic output toward a desired pronunciation exemplar while guaranteeing zero first-order change on a preserved speech corpus.
title SonoEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Pronunciation Correction in LLM-Based TTS
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17086