# Emotional Dimension Control in Language Model-Based Text-to-Speech: Spanning a Broad Spectrum of Human Emotions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16681/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [Style Tokens: Unsupervised Style Modeling, Control and Transfer in End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09017/) (2018)
- [emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15185/) (2023)
- [Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03540/) (2023)
- [Speak Foreign Languages with Your Own Voice: Cross-Lingual Neural Codec Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03926/) (2023)
- [Dawn of the transformer era in speech emotion recognition: closing the valence gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07378/) (2022)
- [Seen and Unseen emotional style transfer for voice conversion with a new emotional speech dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14794/) (2020)
- [Emotional Voice Conversion: Theory, Databases and ESD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14762/) (2021)
- [BASE TTS: Lessons from building a billion-parameter Text-to-Speech model on 100K hours of data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08093/) (2024)
- [CLaM-TTS: Improving Neural Codec Language Model for Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02781/) (2024)
- [Emotion Intensity and its Control for Emotional Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03967/) (2022)
- [An Overview of Affective Speech Synthesis and Conversion in the Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03538/) (2022)
- [Predicting Expressive Speaking Style From Text In End-To-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01410/) (2018)
- [Emotional End-to-End Neural Speech Synthesizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05447/) (2017)
- [Speech Synthesis with Mixed Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05890/) (2022)
- [EmoSphere-TTS: Emotional Style and Intensity Modeling via Spherical Emotion Vector for Controllable Emotional Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07803/) (2024)
- [Converting Anyone's Emotion: Towards Speaker-Independent Emotional Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07025/) (2020)
- [Exploring Transfer Learning for Low Resource Emotional TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04276/) (2019)
- [EmoMix: Emotion Mixing via Diffusion Models for Emotional Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00648/) (2023)
- [Laugh Now Cry Later: Controlling Time-Varying Emotional States of Flow-Matching-Based Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12229/) (2024)
- [Limited Data Emotional Voice Conversion Leveraging Text-to-Speech: Two-stage Sequence-to-Sequence Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16809/) (2021)
- [Language Model-Based Emotion Prediction Methods for Emotional Speech Synthesis Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15067/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Speech Synthesis from a Large Discrete Token-based Speech Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09768/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Emotion Prediction and Control in Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09171/) (2024)
- [Expressivity and Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19363/) (2024)
- [Learning Arousal-Valence Representation from Categorical Emotion Labels of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14816/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [EmoSphere++: Emotion-Controllable Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech via Emotion-Adaptive Spherical Vector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02625/) (2024)
- [A Review of Human Emotion Synthesis Based on Generative Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07116/) (2024)
- [DiEmo-TTS: Disentangled Emotion Representations via Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Speaker Emotion Transfer in Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19687/) (2025)
- [Prompt-Unseen-Emotion: Zero-shot Expressive Speech Synthesis with Prompt-LLM Contextual Knowledge for Mixed Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02742/) (2025)
- [EmoTra-TTS: Smooth Intra-Utterance Emotion Transitions for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23791/) (2026)
- [EmoInstruct-TTS: Dual-Path Instruction-Guided Emotional Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20650/) (2026)
- [Alignment-Free Text-Audiobox for Voice Dubbing and Full-Duplex Dialogue Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03992/) (2026)
- [Tacit-TTS: From Autoregressive Decoding to Masked Prediction for Efficient Transcript-Free Voice Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38658/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotional text-to-speech (TTS) systems sturggle to capture the full spectrum of human emotions due to the inherent complexity of emotional expressions and the limited coverage of existing emotion labels. To address this, we propose a language model-based TTS framework that synthesizes speech across a broad range of emotional styles. Our approach enables flexible user control along three continuous dimensions - pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD). To enable this, we train an emotional dimension predictor that maps categorical emotion labels in speech datasets into the PAD space, grounded in established psychological research. Importantly, while the emotional dimension predictor leverages categorical labels, the TTS framework itself does not require explict emotion labels during training. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that our framework effectively generates more expressive emotional styles and enhances both naturalness and diversity compared to baselines.