# Spark-TTS: An Efficient LLM-Based Text-to-Speech Model with Single-Stream Decoupled Speech Tokens

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01710 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01710/

## Key facts

- Cited by 113 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04627/) (2021)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06711/) (2019)
- [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)
- [emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15185/) (2023)
- [Emilia: An Extensive, Multilingual, and Diverse Speech Dataset for Large-Scale Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05361/) (2024)
- [XTTS: a Massively Multilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04904/) (2024)
- [DDSP: Differentiable Digital Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04643/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Comparative layer-wise analysis of self-supervised speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03929/) (2022)
- [VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05370/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15804/) (2026)
- [CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17589/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-TTS Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15621/) (2026)
- [Step-Audio 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16632/) (2025)
- [IndexTTS2: A Breakthrough in Emotionally Expressive and Duration-Controlled Auto-Regressive Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21619/) (2025)
- [EmoVoice: LLM-based Emotional Text-To-Speech Model with Freestyle Text Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12867/) (2025)
- [ZipVoice: Fast and High-Quality Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13053/) (2025)
- [VibeVoice Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19205/) (2025)
- [OmniVoice: Towards Omnilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00688/) (2026)
- [EmergentTTS-Eval: Evaluating TTS Models on Complex Prosodic, Expressiveness, and Linguistic Challenges Using Model-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23009/) (2025)
- [SoundMind: RL-Incentivized Logic Reasoning for Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12935/) (2025)
- [Analyzable Chain-of-Musical-Thought Prompting for High-Fidelity Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19611/) (2025)
- [MOSS-TTS Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18090/) (2026)
- [TaDiCodec: Text-aware Diffusion Speech Tokenizer for Speech Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16790/) (2025)
- [DMOSpeech 2: Reinforcement Learning for Duration Prediction in Metric-Optimized Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14988/) (2025)
- [Discrete Tokenization for Multimodal LLMs: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22920/) (2025)
- [ZipVoice-Dialog: Non-Autoregressive Spoken Dialogue Generation with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09318/) (2025)
- [SageLM: A Multi-aspect and Explainable Large Language Model for Speech Judgement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20916/) (2025)
- [UniSS: Unified Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation with Your Voice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21144/) (2025)
- [Step-Audio-EditX Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03601/) (2025)
- [Stream-Voice-Anon: Enhancing Utility of Real-Time Speaker Anonymization via Neural Audio Codec and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13948/) (2026)
- [FlowDubber: Movie Dubbing with LLM-based Semantic-aware Learning and Flow Matching based Voice Enhancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01263/) (2025)
- [M3-TTS: Multi-modal DiT Alignment & Mel-latent for Zero-shot High-fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04720/) (2025)
- [UltraEval-Audio: A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation of Audio Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01373/) (2026)
- [IndexTTS 2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03888/) (2026)
- [OmniResponse: Online Multimodal Conversational Response Generation in Dyadic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21724/) (2025)
- [VoXtream: Full-Stream Text-to-Speech with Extremely Low Latency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15969/) (2025)
- [From Scores to Preferences: Redefining MOS Benchmarking for Speech Quality Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00743/) (2025)
- [FlowTTS-GRPO: Online Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Objective Reward Optimization for Flow-Matching Based Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23190/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, existing foundation models rely on multi-stage processing or complex architectures for predicting multiple codebooks, limiting efficiency and integration flexibility. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Spark-TTS, a novel system powered by BiCodec, a single-stream speech codec that decomposes speech into two complementary token types: low-bitrate semantic tokens for linguistic content and fixed-length global tokens for speaker attributes. This disentangled representation, combined with the Qwen2.5 LLM and a chain-of-thought (CoT) generation approach, enables both coarse-grained control (e.g., gender, speaking style) and fine-grained adjustments (e.g., precise pitch values, speaking rate). To facilitate research in controllable TTS, we introduce VoxBox, a meticulously curated 100,000-hour dataset with comprehensive attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spark-TTS not only achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot voice cloning but also generates highly customizable voices that surpass the limitations of reference-based synthesis. Source code, pre-trained models, and audio samples are available at https://github.com/SparkAudio/Spark-TTS.
