# VQ-CTAP: Cross-Modal Fine-Grained Sequence Representation Learning for Speech Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05758 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05758/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/) (2023)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [vq-wav2vec: Self-Supervised Learning of Discrete Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05453/) (2019)
- [AudioCLIP: Extending CLIP to Image, Text and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13043/) (2021)
- [Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11129/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09116/) (2023)
- [NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03100/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Kling-Foley: Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19774/) (2025)
- [AudioGen-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Video-Synchronized Audio, Speech, and Song Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00733/) (2025)
- [MM-Sonate: Multimodal Controllable Audio-Video Generation with Zero-Shot Voice Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01568/) (2026)
- [M3-TTS: Multi-modal DiT Alignment & Mel-latent for Zero-shot High-fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04720/) (2025)
- [SecoustiCodec: Cross-Modal Aligned Streaming Single-Codecbook Speech Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02849/) (2025)
- [InstructAudio: Unified speech and music generation with natural language instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18487/) (2025)
- [UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22209/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning has brought significant improvements to the field of cross-modal representation learning. For tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and automatic speech recognition (ASR), a cross-modal fine-grained (frame-level) sequence representation is desired, emphasizing the semantic content of the text modality while de-emphasizing the paralinguistic information of the speech modality. We propose a method called "Vector Quantized Contrastive Token-Acoustic Pre-training (VQ-CTAP)", which uses the cross-modal aligned sequence transcoder to bring text and speech into a joint multimodal space, learning how to connect text and speech at the frame level. The proposed VQ-CTAP is a paradigm for cross-modal sequence representation learning, offering a promising solution for fine-grained generation and recognition tasks in speech processing. The VQ-CTAP can be directly applied to VC and ASR tasks without fine-tuning or additional structures. We propose a sequence-aware semantic connector, which connects multiple frozen pre-trained modules for the TTS task, exhibiting a plug-and-play capability. We design a stepping optimization strategy to ensure effective model convergence by gradually injecting and adjusting the influence of various loss components. Furthermore, we propose a semantic-transfer-wise paralinguistic consistency loss to enhance representational capabilities, allowing the model to better generalize to unseen data and capture the nuances of paralinguistic information. In addition, VQ-CTAP achieves high-compression speech coding at a rate of 25Hz from 24kHz input waveforms, which is a 960-fold reduction in the sampling rate. The audio demo is available at https://qiangchunyu.github.io/VQCTAP/