# ELLA-V: Stable Neural Codec Language Modeling with Alignment-guided Sequence Reordering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [Cluster-GCN: An Efficient Algorithm for Training Deep and Large Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07953/) (2019)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12661/) (2023)
- [WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00002/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice 2: Scalable Streaming Speech Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10117/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17589/) (2025)
- [VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05370/) (2024)
- [VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16973/) (2024)
- [Llasa: Scaling Train-Time and Inference-Time Compute for Llama-based Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04128/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08551/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Discrete Speech Tokens: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06490/) (2025)
- [MegaTTS 3: Sparse Alignment Enhanced Latent Diffusion Transformer for Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18924/) (2025)
- [VALL-E R: Robust and Efficient Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Monotonic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07855/) (2024)
- [Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18619/) (2024)
- [Koel-TTS: Enhancing LLM based Speech Generation with Preference Alignment and Classifier Free Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05236/) (2025)
- [RALL-E: Robust Codec Language Modeling with Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03204/) (2024)
- [Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06602/) (2024)
- [Improving Robustness of LLM-based Speech Synthesis by Learning Monotonic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17957/) (2024)
- [Fast and High-Quality Auto-Regressive Speech Synthesis via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21951/) (2024)
- [PSLM: Parallel Generation of Text and Speech with LLMs for Low-Latency Spoken Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12428/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Codec-based Speech Synthesis with Multi-Token Prediction and Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13839/) (2024)
- [Pseudo-Autoregressive Neural Codec Language Models for Efficient Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10352/) (2025)
- [FELLE: Autoregressive Speech Synthesis with Token-Wise Coarse-to-Fine Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11128/) (2025)
- [E1 TTS: Simple and Fast Non-Autoregressive TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09351/) (2024)
- [StyleTTS-ZS: Efficient High-Quality Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Distilled Time-Varying Style Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10058/) (2024)
- [ZipVoice-Dialog: Non-Autoregressive Spoken Dialogue Generation with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09318/) (2025)
- [KALL-E:Autoregressive Speech Synthesis with Next-Distribution Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16846/) (2024)
- [Spoken Language Modeling with Duration-Penalized Self-Supervised Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23494/) (2025)
- [Robust and Unbounded Length Generalization in Autoregressive Transformer-Based Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22179/) (2024)
- [OZSpeech: One-step Zero-shot Speech Synthesis with Learned-Prior-Conditioned Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12800/) (2025)
- [Robust and Efficient Autoregressive Speech Synthesis with Dynamic Chunk-wise Prediction Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22023/) (2025)
- [Bailing-TTS: Chinese Dialectal Speech Synthesis Towards Human-like Spontaneous Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00284/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Streaming Text to Speech Synthesis with Transducer and Auto-Regressive Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19669/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The language model (LM) approach based on acoustic and linguistic prompts, such as VALL-E, has achieved remarkable progress in the field of zero-shot audio generation. However, existing methods still have some limitations: 1) repetitions, transpositions, and omissions in the output synthesized speech due to limited alignment constraints between audio and phoneme tokens; 2) challenges of fine-grained control over the synthesized speech with autoregressive (AR) language model; 3) infinite silence generation due to the nature of AR-based decoding, especially under the greedy strategy. To alleviate these issues, we propose ELLA-V, a simple but efficient LM-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) framework, which enables fine-grained control over synthesized audio at the phoneme level. The key to ELLA-V is interleaving sequences of acoustic and phoneme tokens, where phoneme tokens appear ahead of the corresponding acoustic tokens. The experimental findings reveal that our model outperforms VALL-E in terms of accuracy and delivers more stable results using both greedy and sampling-based decoding strategies. The code of ELLA-V will be open-sourced after cleanups. Audio samples are available at https://ereboas.github.io/ELLAV/.