# StarGAN-ZSVC: Towards Zero-Shot Voice Conversion in Low-Resource Contexts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00043/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08083/) (2016)
- [Cyclical Learning Rates for Training Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01186/) (2015)
- [Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01187/) (2018)
- [MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06711/) (2019)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00002/) (2018)
- [Generalized End-to-End Loss for Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10467/) (2017)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [AUTOVC: Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Only Autoencoder Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05879/) (2019)
- [An Overview of Voice Conversion and its Challenges: From Statistical Modeling to Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03648/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised speech representation learning using WaveNet autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08810/) (2019)
- [StarGAN-VC: Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion with star generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02169/) (2018)
- [Voice Conversion Challenge 2020: Intra-lingual semi-parallel and cross-lingual voice conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12527/) (2020)
- [The Voice Conversion Challenge 2018: Promoting Development of Parallel and Nonparallel Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04262/) (2018)
- [StarGAN-VC2: Rethinking Conditional Methods for StarGAN-Based Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12279/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Voice Conversion-based Privacy Protection against Informed Attackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03934/) (2019)
- [Defending Your Voice: Adversarial Attack on Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08781/) (2020)
- [ConVoice: Real-Time Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07815/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Zero-Shot Voice Conditioning for Denoising Diffusion TTS Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02246/) (2022)
- [Voice Conversion Can Improve ASR in Very Low-Resource Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02674/) (2021)
- [Reimagining Speech: A Scoping Review of Deep Learning-Powered Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08104/) (2023)
- [Degrading Voice: A Comprehensive Overview of Robust Voice Conversion Through Input Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06304/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Voice conversion is the task of converting a spoken utterance from a source speaker so that it appears to be said by a different target speaker while retaining the linguistic content of the utterance. Recent advances have led to major improvements in the quality of voice conversion systems. However, to be useful in a wider range of contexts, voice conversion systems would need to be (i) trainable without access to parallel data, (ii) work in a zero-shot setting where both the source and target speakers are unseen during training, and (iii) run in real time or faster. Recent techniques fulfil one or two of these requirements, but not all three. This paper extends recent voice conversion models based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), to satisfy all three of these conditions. We specifically extend the recent StarGAN-VC model by conditioning it on a speaker embedding (from a potentially unseen speaker). This allows the model to be used in a zero-shot setting, and we therefore call it StarGAN-ZSVC. We compare StarGAN-ZSVC against other voice conversion techniques in a low-resource setting using a small 9-minute training set. Compared to AutoVC -- another recent neural zero-shot approach -- we observe that StarGAN-ZSVC gives small improvements in the zero-shot setting, showing that real-time zero-shot voice conversion is possible even for a model trained on very little data. Further work is required to see whether scaling up StarGAN-ZSVC will also improve zero-shot voice conversion quality in high-resource contexts.