# CLaM-TTS: Improving Neural Codec Language Model for Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [MaskGCT: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Masked Generative Codec Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00750/) (2024)
- [Codec Does Matter: Exploring the Semantic Shortcoming of Codec for Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17175/) (2024)
- [SD-Eval: A Benchmark Dataset for Spoken Dialogue Understanding Beyond Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13340/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08551/) (2024)
- [VALL-E R: Robust and Efficient Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Monotonic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07855/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer for Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05551/) (2024)
- [DiTTo-TTS: Diffusion Transformers for Scalable Text-to-Speech without Domain-Specific Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11427/) (2024)
- [FlashSpeech: Efficient Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14700/) (2024)
- [Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06602/) (2024)
- [FocalCodec: Low-Bitrate Speech Coding via Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04465/) (2025)
- [TASTE: Text-Aligned Speech Tokenization and Embedding for Spoken Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07053/) (2025)
- [SSDM: Scalable Speech Dysfluency Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16221/) (2024)
- [dMel: Speech Tokenization made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15835/) (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)
- [Emotional Dimension Control in Language Model-Based Text-to-Speech: Spanning a Broad Spectrum of Human Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16681/) (2024)
- [FELLE: Autoregressive Speech Synthesis with Token-Wise Coarse-to-Fine Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11128/) (2025)
- [StyleTTS-ZS: Efficient High-Quality Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Distilled Time-Varying Style Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10058/) (2024)
- [Efficient Generative Modeling with Residual Vector Quantization-Based Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10208/) (2024)
- [Text-To-Speech Synthesis In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08711/) (2024)
- [DMOSpeech: Direct Metric Optimization via Distilled Diffusion Model in Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11097/) (2024)
- [Voice Cloning: Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00579/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Streaming Text to Speech Synthesis with Transducer and Auto-Regressive Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19669/) (2025)
- [VoiceCraft-X: Unifying Multilingual, Voice-Cloning Speech Synthesis and Speech Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12347/) (2025)
- [Task Vector in TTS: Toward Emotionally Expressive Dialectal Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18699/) (2025)
- [SupertonicTTS: Towards Highly Efficient and Streamlined Text-to-Speech System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23108/) (2025)
- [Bahasa Harmony: A Comprehensive Dataset for Bahasa Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Discrete Codec Modeling of EnGen-TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06608/) (2024)
- [Lina-Speech: Gated Linear Attention and Initial-State Tuning for Multi-Sample Prompting Text-To-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23320/) (2024)
- [Efficient Speech Language Modeling via Energy Distance in Continuous Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13181/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Speech Enhancement via Acoustic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12825/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the emergence of neural audio codecs, which encode multiple streams of discrete tokens from audio, large language models have recently gained attention as a promising approach for zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis. Despite the ongoing rush towards scaling paradigms, audio tokenization ironically amplifies the scalability challenge, stemming from its long sequence length and the complexity of modelling the multiple sequences. To mitigate these issues, we present CLaM-TTS that employs a probabilistic residual vector quantization to (1) achieve superior compression in the token length, and (2) allow a language model to generate multiple tokens at once, thereby eliminating the need for cascaded modeling to handle the number of token streams. Our experimental results demonstrate that CLaM-TTS is better than or comparable to state-of-the-art neural codec-based TTS models regarding naturalness, intelligibility, speaker similarity, and inference speed. In addition, we examine the impact of the pretraining extent of the language models and their text tokenization strategies on performances.
