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Main Authors: Cheng, Changhao, Wang, Wei, Zhang, Wangyou, Jia, Dongya, Wu, Jian, Chen, Zhuo, Qian, Yanmin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12383
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author Cheng, Changhao
Wang, Wei
Zhang, Wangyou
Jia, Dongya
Wu, Jian
Chen, Zhuo
Qian, Yanmin
author_facet Cheng, Changhao
Wang, Wei
Zhang, Wangyou
Jia, Dongya
Wu, Jian
Chen, Zhuo
Qian, Yanmin
contents Continuous speech representations based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional spectrogram or discrete token based features for speech generation and reconstruction. Recent research has tried to enrich the structural information in VAE latent representations by aligning with self-supervised learning (SSL) features, aiming for better generation performance. However, it remains unclear whether the widely-used alignment approach based on time-axis distillation is optimal when considering more tasks. To address this problem, this paper systematically explores different alignment approaches and analyzes their impact on the performances over three axes: reconstruction, understanding, and generation. We investigate various design choices in the distillation loss. Extensive experiments show that the joint-marginal alignment approach with adaptive weighting can achieve the best overall performance while allowing for a controllable balance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_12383
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Distillation Loss Functions of Speech VAE for Unified Reconstruction, Understanding, and Generation
Cheng, Changhao
Wang, Wei
Zhang, Wangyou
Jia, Dongya
Wu, Jian
Chen, Zhuo
Qian, Yanmin
Sound
Continuous speech representations based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional spectrogram or discrete token based features for speech generation and reconstruction. Recent research has tried to enrich the structural information in VAE latent representations by aligning with self-supervised learning (SSL) features, aiming for better generation performance. However, it remains unclear whether the widely-used alignment approach based on time-axis distillation is optimal when considering more tasks. To address this problem, this paper systematically explores different alignment approaches and analyzes their impact on the performances over three axes: reconstruction, understanding, and generation. We investigate various design choices in the distillation loss. Extensive experiments show that the joint-marginal alignment approach with adaptive weighting can achieve the best overall performance while allowing for a controllable balance.
title On the Distillation Loss Functions of Speech VAE for Unified Reconstruction, Understanding, and Generation
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12383