# RefineGAN: Universally Generating Waveform Better than Ground Truth with Highly Accurate Pitch and Intensity Responses

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00962 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00962/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00713/) (2020)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Rectified Activations in Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00853/) (2015)
- [MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06711/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Adversarial Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04208/) (2018)
- [Efficient Neural Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08435/) (2018)
- [AISHELL-3: A Multi-speaker Mandarin TTS Corpus and the Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11567/) (2020)
- [CREPE: A Convolutional Representation for Pitch Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06182/) (2018)
- [UnivNet: A Neural Vocoder with Multi-Resolution Spectrogram Discriminators for High-Fidelity Waveform Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07889/) (2021)
- [Hi-Fi Multi-Speaker English TTS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01497/) (2021)
- [JSUT corpus: free large-scale Japanese speech corpus for end-to-end speech synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00354/) (2017)
- [Mellotron: Multispeaker expressive voice synthesis by conditioning on rhythm, pitch and global style tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11997/) (2019)
- [HiFiSinger: Towards High-Fidelity Neural Singing Voice Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01776/) (2020)
- [XiaoiceSing: A High-Quality and Integrated Singing Voice Synthesis System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06261/) (2020)
- [DeepSinger: Singing Voice Synthesis with Data Mined From the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04590/) (2020)
- [CycleGAN-VC3: Examining and Improving CycleGAN-VCs for Mel-spectrogram Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11672/) (2020)
- [ByteSing: A Chinese Singing Voice Synthesis System Using Duration Allocated Encoder-Decoder Acoustic Models and WaveRNN Vocoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11012/) (2020)
- [Att-HACK: An Expressive Speech Database with Social Attitudes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04410/) (2020)
- [MelGAN-VC: Voice Conversion and Audio Style Transfer on arbitrarily long samples using Spectrograms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03713/) (2019)
- [Adversarially Trained Multi-Singer Sequence-To-Sequence Singing Synthesizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10317/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [EVA-GAN: Enhanced Various Audio Generation via Scalable Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00892/) (2024)
- [Melody or Machine: Detecting Synthetic Music with Dual-Stream Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00621/) (2025)
- [Training Universal Vocoders with Feature Smoothing-Based Augmentation Methods for High-Quality TTS Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02517/) (2024)
- [ConSinger: Efficient High-Fidelity Singing Voice Generation with Minimal Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15342/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Latent Mismatch in cVAE-Based Singing Voice Synthesis via Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00217/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most GAN(Generative Adversarial Network)-based approaches towards high-fidelity waveform generation heavily rely on discriminators to improve their performance. However, GAN methods introduce much uncertainty into the generation process and often result in mismatches of pitch and intensity, which is fatal when it comes to sensitive use cases such as singing voice synthesis(SVS). To address this problem, we propose RefineGAN, a high-fidelity neural vocoder focused on the robustness, pitch and intensity accuracy, and high-speed full-band audio generation. We applyed a pitch-guided refine architecture with a multi-scale spectrogram-based loss function to help stabilize the training process and maintain the robustness of the neural vocoder while using the GAN-based training method. Audio generated using this method shows a better performance in subjective tests when compared with the ground-truth audio. This result shows that the fidelity is even improved during the waveform reconstruction by eliminating defects produced by recording procedures. Moreover, it shows that models trained on a specified type of data can perform on totally unseen language and unseen speaker identically well. Generated sample pairs are provided onhttps://timedomain-tech.github.io/refinegan/.