# NVC-Net: End-to-End Adversarial Voice Conversion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00992/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/) (2019)
- [WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00002/) (2018)
- [Neural Audio Synthesis of Musical Notes with WaveNet Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01279/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04208/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Efficient Neural Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08435/) (2018)
- [AUTOVC: Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Only Autoencoder Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05879/) (2019)
- [DDSP: Differentiable Digital Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04643/) (2020)
- [An Overview of Voice Conversion and its Challenges: From Statistical Modeling to Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03648/) (2020)
- [High Fidelity Speech Synthesis with Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11646/) (2019)
- [One-shot Voice Conversion by Separating Speaker and Content Representations with Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05742/) (2019)
- [StarGAN-VC: Non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion with star generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02169/) (2018)
- [The Voice Conversion Challenge 2018: Promoting Development of Parallel and Nonparallel Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04262/) (2018)
- [Voice Conversion from Non-parallel Corpora Using Variational Auto-encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04019/) (2016)
- [DeepFake Detection: Current Challenges and Next Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09234/) (2020)
- [Voice Conversion from Unaligned Corpora using Variational Autoencoding Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00849/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Training Robust Zero-Shot Voice Conversion Models with Self-supervised Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04424/) (2021)
- [Disentangling speech from surroundings with neural embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15578/) (2022)
- [Towards General-Purpose Text-Instruction-Guided Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14324/) (2023)
- [HiFi-VC: High Quality ASR-Based Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16937/) (2022)
- [SLMGAN: Exploiting Speech Language Model Representations for Unsupervised Zero-Shot Voice Conversion in GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09435/) (2023)
- [Reimagining Speech: A Scoping Review of Deep Learning-Powered Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08104/) (2023)
- [Fast-VGAN: Lightweight Voice Conversion with Explicit Control of F0 and Duration Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04817/) (2025)
- [Converting Anyone's Voice: End-to-End Expressive Voice Conversion with a Conditional Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01730/) (2024)
- [A survey of AI-generated voices and their detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15411/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Voice conversion has gained increasing popularity in many applications of speech synthesis. The idea is to change the voice identity from one speaker into another while keeping the linguistic content unchanged. Many voice conversion approaches rely on the use of a vocoder to reconstruct the speech from acoustic features, and as a consequence, the speech quality heavily depends on such a vocoder. In this paper, we propose NVC-Net, an end-to-end adversarial network, which performs voice conversion directly on the raw audio waveform of arbitrary length. By disentangling the speaker identity from the speech content, NVC-Net is able to perform non-parallel traditional many-to-many voice conversion as well as zero-shot voice conversion from a short utterance of an unseen target speaker. Importantly, NVC-Net is non-autoregressive and fully convolutional, achieving fast inference. Our model is capable of producing samples at a rate of more than 3600 kHz on an NVIDIA V100 GPU, being orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods under the same hardware configurations. Objective and subjective evaluations on non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion tasks show that NVC-Net obtains competitive results with significantly fewer parameters.