CTC-TTS: LLM-based dual-streaming text-to-speech with CTC alignment
Hanwen LiuSaierdaer YusuyinHao HuangZhijian Ou
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
Large-language-model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems can generate natural speech, but most are not designed for low-latency dual-streaming synthesis. High-quality dual-streaming TTS depends on accurate text--speech alignment and well-designed training sequences that balance synthesis quality and latency. Prior work often relies on GMM-HMM based forced-alignment toolkits (e.g., MFA), which are pipeline-heavy and less flexible than neural aligners; fixed-ratio interleaving of text and speech tokens struggles to capture text--speech alignment regularities. We propose CTC-TTS, which replaces MFA with a CTC based aligner and introduces a bi-word based interleaving strategy. Two variants are designed: CTC-TTS-L (token concatenation along the sequence length) for higher quality and CTC-TTS-F (embedding stacking along the feature dimension) for lower latency. Experiments show that CTC-TTS outperforms fixed-ratio interleaving and MFA-based baselines on streaming synthesis and zero-shot tasks.
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of such models.
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
This work investigates the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection and finds that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases.
Empirically, PRISM reduces the end-to-end time for data selection and model tuning to just 30% of conventional pipelines, and achieves this efficiency while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across eight multimodal and three language understanding benchmarks.
Jinhe Bi, Yifan Wang, Danqi Yan et al.· arXiv.org· 73 citations· ⚡4
The method, ECCOLA, is presented, which aims at making the high-level AI ethics principles more practical, making it possible for developers to more easily implement them in practice.
Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, P. Abrahamsson· EUROMICRO Conference on Soft...· 64 citations· ⚡6
This paper designs Markov decision processes (MDPs) for different combinatorial problems and proposes to train conditional GFlowNets to sample from the solution space and demonstrates that GFlowNet policies can efficiently find high-quality solutions.
Dinghuai Zhang, H. Dai, Esmeralda S. Whitammer et al.· Advances in Neural Informati...· 59 citations· ⚡8
An empirical study on the current state of practice in artificial intelligence ethics is conducted by means of a multiple case study of five case companies, which indicates a gap between research and practice in the area.
Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Joni Kultanen et al.· arXiv.org· 56 citations· ⚡6
