WaveFlow: A Compact Flow-based Model for Raw Audio

In this work, we propose WaveFlow, a small-footprint generative flow for raw audio, which is directly trained with maximum likelihood. It handles the long-range structure of 1-D waveform with a dilated 2-D convolutional architecture, while modeling the local variations using expressive autoregressive functions. WaveFlow provides a unified view of likelihood-based models for 1-D data, including WaveNet and WaveGlow as special cases. It generates high-fidelity speech as WaveNet, while synthesizing several orders of magnitude faster as it only requires a few sequential steps to generate very long waveforms with hundreds of thousands of time-steps. Furthermore, it can significantly reduce the likelihood gap that has existed between autoregressive models and flow-based models for efficient synthesis. Finally, our small-footprint WaveFlow has only 5. 91M parameters, which is 15{\texttimes} smaller than WaveGlow. It can generate 22. 05 kHz high-fidelity audio 42. 6{\texttimes} faster than real-time (at a rate of 939. 3 kHz) on a V100 GPU without engineered inference kernels.

Authors

• Wei Ping
• Kainan Peng
• Kexin Zhao
• Zhao Song 0001

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