# VQMIVC: Vector Quantization and Mutual Information-Based Unsupervised Speech Representation Disentanglement for One-shot Voice Conversion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10132 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10132/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [MINE: Mutual Information Neural Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04062/) (2018)
- [vq-wav2vec: Self-Supervised Learning of Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05453/) (2019)
- [Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/) (2019)
- [CLUB: A Contrastive Log-ratio Upper Bound of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12013/) (2020)
- [AUTOVC: Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Only Autoencoder Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05879/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised speech representation learning using WaveNet autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08810/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Speech Decomposition via Triple Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11284/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Jasper: An End-to-End Convolutional Neural Acoustic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03288/) (2019)
- [Vector-quantized neural networks for acoustic unit discovery in the ZeroSpeech 2020 challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09409/) (2020)
- [AGAIN-VC: A One-shot Voice Conversion using Activation Guidance and Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00316/) (2020)
- [Voice Conversion from Unaligned Corpora using Variational Autoencoding Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00849/) (2017)
- [F0-consistent many-to-many non-parallel voice conversion via conditional autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07370/) (2020)
- [VQVC+: One-Shot Voice Conversion by Vector Quantization and U-Net architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04154/) (2020)
- [Improving Zero-shot Voice Style Transfer via Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09420/) (2021)
- [Parallel-Data-Free Voice Conversion Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11293/) (2017)
- [Learning Speaker Representations with Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00271/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Style and Content Separation by Minimizing Mutual Information for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06227/) (2020)
- [Intra-class variation reduction of speaker representation in disentanglement framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01348/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Fast Maximum Likelihood Sampling Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13821/) (2021)
- [FreeVC: Towards High-Quality Text-Free One-Shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15418/) (2022)
- [Voice Conversion With Just Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18975/) (2023)
- [Face-Dubbing++: Lip-Synchronous, Voice Preserving Translation of Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04523/) (2022)
- [StreamVC: Real-Time Low-Latency Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03078/) (2024)
- [Speech Representation Disentanglement with Adversarial Mutual Information Learning for One-shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08757/) (2022)
- [StableVC: Style Controllable Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Conditional Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04724/) (2024)
- [Convert and Speak: Zero-shot Accent Conversion with Minimum Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10096/) (2024)
- [Learning the Beauty in Songs: Neural Singing Voice Beautifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13277/) (2022)
- [Disentangled Feature Learning for Real-Time Neural Speech Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11960/) (2022)
- [Phoneme Hallucinator: One-shot Voice Conversion via Set Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06382/) (2023)
- [End-to-end streaming model for low-latency speech anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09277/) (2024)
- [Towards High-fidelity Singing Voice Conversion with Acoustic Reference and Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04754/) (2021)
- [Content-Context Factorized Representations for Automated Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09872/) (2022)
- [Face-Driven Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Memory-based Face-Voice Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09470/) (2023)
- [The Third VoicePrivacy Challenge: Preserving Emotional Expressiveness and Linguistic Content in Voice Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11846/) (2026)
- [VoiceShop: A Unified Speech-to-Speech Framework for Identity-Preserving Zero-Shot Voice Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06674/) (2024)
- [FastVoiceGrad: One-step Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Adversarial Conditional Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02245/) (2024)
- [VCVTS: Multi-speaker Video-to-Speech synthesis via cross-modal knowledge transfer from voice conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09081/) (2022)
- [Video-Guided Curriculum Learning for Spoken Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00277/) (2022)
- [Imperceptible Rhythm Backdoor Attacks: Exploring Rhythm Transformation for Embedding Undetectable Vulnerabilities on Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10932/) (2024)
- [Improving Pronunciation and Accent Conversion through Knowledge Distillation And Synthetic Ground-Truth from Native TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14997/) (2024)
- [An Exhaustive Evaluation of TTS- and VC-based Data Augmentation for ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08954/) (2025)
- [TVTSyn: Content-Synchronous Time-Varying Timbre for Streaming Voice Conversion and Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09389/) (2026)
- [PITS: Variational Pitch Inference without Fundamental Frequency for End-to-End Pitch-controllable TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12391/) (2023)
- [DualVC: Dual-mode Voice Conversion using Intra-model Knowledge Distillation and Hybrid Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12425/) (2023)
- [Voice Conversion for Stuttered Speech, Instruments, Unseen Languages and Textually Described Voices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08104/) (2023)
- [Hear Your Face: Face-based voice conversion with F0 estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09802/) (2024)
- [Optimal Transport Maps are Good Voice Converters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02402/) (2024)
- [The First VoicePrivacy Attacker Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14183/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One-shot voice conversion (VC), which performs conversion across arbitrary speakers with only a single target-speaker utterance for reference, can be effectively achieved by speech representation disentanglement. Existing work generally ignores the correlation between different speech representations during training, which causes leakage of content information into the speaker representation and thus degrades VC performance. To alleviate this issue, we employ vector quantization (VQ) for content encoding and introduce mutual information (MI) as the correlation metric during training, to achieve proper disentanglement of content, speaker and pitch representations, by reducing their inter-dependencies in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results reflect the superiority of the proposed method in learning effective disentangled speech representations for retaining source linguistic content and intonation variations, while capturing target speaker characteristics. In doing so, the proposed approach achieves higher speech naturalness and speaker similarity than current state-of-the-art one-shot VC systems. Our code, pre-trained models and demo are available at https://github.com/Wendison/VQMIVC.