Fine-Grained Quantitative Emotion Editing for Speech Generation

It remains a significant challenge how to quantitatively control the expressiveness of speech emotion in speech generation. In this work, we present a novel approach for manipulating the rendering of emotions for speech generation. We propose a hierarchical emotion distribution extractor, i.e. Hierarchical ED, that quantifies the intensity of emotions at different levels of granularity. Support vector machines (SVMs) are employed to rank emotion intensity, resulting in a hierarchical emotional embedding. Hierarchical ED is subsequently integrated into the FastSpeech2 framework, guiding the model to learn emotion intensity at phoneme, word, and utterance levels. During synthesis, users can manually edit the emotional intensity of the generated voices. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed network in terms of fine-grained quantitative emotion editing.

Style-Restricted GAN: Multi-Modal Translation with Style Restriction Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Unpaired image-to-image translation using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) is successful in converting images among multiple domains. Moreover, recent studies have shown a way to diversify the outputs of the generator. However, since there are no restrictions on how the generator diversifies the results, it is likely to translate some unexpected features. In this paper, we propose Style-Restricted GAN (SRGAN), a novel approach to transfer input images into different domains' with different styles, changing the exclusively class-related features. Additionally, instead of KL divergence loss, we adopt 3 new losses to restrict the distribution of the encoded features: batch KL divergence loss, correlation loss, and histogram imitation loss. The study reports quantitative as well as qualitative results with Precision, Recall, Density, and Coverage. The proposed 3 losses lead to the enhancement of the level of diversity compared to the conventional KL loss. In particular, SRGAN is found to be successful in translating with higher diversity and without changing the class-unrelated features in the CelebA face dataset. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/shinshoji01/Style-Restricted_GAN.