# GenVC: Self-Supervised Zero-Shot Voice Conversion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [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)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [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)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [CosyVoice 2: Scalable Streaming Speech Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10117/) (2024)
- [YourTTS: Towards Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS and Zero-Shot Voice Conversion for everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02418/) (2021)
- [NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09116/) (2023)
- [AUTOVC: Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Only Autoencoder Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05879/) (2019)
- [XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04904/) (2024)
- [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)
- [MaskGCT: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Masked Generative Codec Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00750/) (2024)

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

- [TVTSyn: Content-Synchronous Time-Varying Timbre for Streaming Voice Conversion and Anonymization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09389/) (2026)
- [NaturalVoices: A Large-Scale, Spontaneous and Emotional Podcast Dataset for Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00256/) (2025)
- [MaskVCT: Masked Voice Codec Transformer for Zero-Shot Voice Conversion With Increased Controllability via Multiple Guidances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17143/) (2025)
- [Provable Speech Attributes Conversion via Latent Independence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05191/) (2025)
- [StreamVoiceAnon+: Emotion-Preserving Streaming Speaker Anonymization via Frame-Level Acoustic Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06079/) (2026)
- [PHONOS: PHOnetic Neutralization for Online Streaming Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27001/) (2026)
- [Understanding Hyperspherical Geometry of ECAPA-TDNN Embedding and Its Impact on Zero-Shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24688/) (2026)
- [VOSSA: Voiceprint Optimization for Streaming Speech Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38887/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most current zero-shot voice conversion methods rely on externally supervised components, particularly speaker encoders, for training. To explore alternatives that eliminate this dependency, this paper introduces GenVC, a novel framework that disentangles speaker identity and linguistic content from speech signals in a self-supervised manner. GenVC leverages speech tokenizers and an autoregressive, Transformer-based language model as its backbone for speech generation. This design supports large-scale training while enhancing both source speaker privacy protection and target speaker cloning fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that GenVC achieves notably higher speaker similarity, with naturalness on par with leading zero-shot approaches. Moreover, due to its autoregressive formulation, GenVC introduces flexibility in temporal alignment, reducing the preservation of source prosody and speaker-specific traits, and making it highly effective for voice anonymization.