Selective Classifier-free Guidance for Zero-shot Text-to-speech

John Zheng; Farhad Maleki

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arXiv · 2509.19668

Selective Classifier-free Guidance for Zero-shot Text-to-speech

John Zheng·Farhad Maleki

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Abstract

In zero-shot text-to-speech, achieving a balance between fidelity to the target speaker and adherence to text content remains a challenge. While classifier-free guidance (CFG) strategies have shown promising results in image generation, their application to speech synthesis are underexplored. Separating the conditions used for CFG enables trade-offs between different desired characteristics in speech synthesis. In this paper, we evaluate the adaptability of CFG strategies originally developed for image generation to speech synthesis and extend separated-condition CFG approaches for this domain. Our results show that CFG strategies effective in image generation generally fail to improve speech synthesis. We also find that we can improve speaker similarity while limiting degradation of text adherence by applying standard CFG during early timesteps and switching to selective CFG only in later timesteps. Surprisingly, we observe that the effectiveness of a selective CFG strategy is highly text-representation dependent, as differences between the two languages of English and Mandarin can lead to different results even with the same model.

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John Zheng, Farhad Maleki. 2025-09-24. Selective Classifier-free Guidance for Zero-shot Text-to-speech. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19668

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