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arXiv · 2510.06201

TokenChain: A Discrete Speech Chain via Semantic Token Modeling

Mingxuan Wang·Satoshi Nakamura
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Abstract

Machine Speech Chain, simulating the human perception-production loop, proves effective in jointly improving ASR and TTS. We propose TokenChain, a fully discrete speech chain coupling semantic-token ASR with a two-stage TTS: an autoregressive text-to-semantic model co-trained with ASR and a masked-generative semantic-to-acoustic model for synthesis only. End-to-end feedback across the text interface is enabled with straight-through argmax/Gumbel-Softmax and balanced with supervised ASR via dynamic weight averaging. Ablations examine optimal temperature schedules for in- and cross-domain transfer. Evaluation reveals TokenChain surpasses baseline accuracy 2-6 epochs earlier and yields 5-13% lower equal-epoch error with stable T2S on LibriSpeech, and reduces relative ASR WER by 56% and T2S WER by 31% on TED-LIUM with minimal forgetting, showing that chain learning remains effective with token interfaces and models.

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BibTeXRIS

Mingxuan Wang, Satoshi Nakamura. 2025-10-07. TokenChain: A Discrete Speech Chain via Semantic Token Modeling. https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp55912.2026.11463160

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