mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Depth through recurrence: Looped transformers for flow-matching TTS

arXiv 2609.29768 ↗First posted 24 Sep 2026eess.AScited by 1

On the map: Diffusion models → Audio, speech and music

Abstract (arXiv)

We study how to organize Transformer depth through recurrence in flow-matching text-to-speech, varying the amount, order, and place?ment of weight reuse. Seven layouts perform 18 block calls per network evaluation under a common training objective and sam?pler. On Seed-TTS and LibriSpeech-PC, SEQUENCE applies each of nine blocks twice consecutively, retaining competitive intelligibil?ity, speaker similarity, and predicted speech quality at 32 sampling steps with 47.1% fewer parameters than the unshared baseline. Cy?cling six blocks three times further reduces model size but raises 32-step word error rates relative to cycling nine blocks twice. At matched parameter counts and executed depth, reuse order and shar?ing position produce different quality trade-offs. These comparisons depend on sampling budget: Prefix and Suffix have similar 32-step word error rates, but Suffix is worse by 3.44 and 5.97 percentage points at four steps on the two datasets, respectively. Only Middle ranks first or second in mean word error rate at 32 and four steps on both datasets. These results show that the organization of recurrent computation affects synthesis quality, and that reuse layouts should be selected for both the sampling budget and the quality dimensions of interest.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 24 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.

Builds on

24 of 26 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching9 Oct

Other references · 23

  1. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  2. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  3. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 4,057
  4. 2019ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representationscited by 2,790
  5. 2021WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processingcited by 1,657
  6. 2019LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speechcited by 649
  7. 2018Universal Transformerscited by 647
  8. 2025Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approachcited by 415
  9. 2022UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022cited by 390
  10. 2023Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scalecited by 379
  11. 2024Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Modelscited by 300
  12. 2023Vocos: Closing the gap between time-domain and Fourier-based neural vocoders for high-quality audio synthesiscited by 153
11 more
  1. 2024E2 TTS: Embarrassingly Easy Fully Non-Autoregressive Zero-Shot TTScited by 152
  2. 2021Lessons on Parameter Sharing across Layers in Transformerscited by 85
  3. 2017Residual Connections Encourage Iterative Inferencecited by 77
  4. 2023LibriSpeech-PC: Benchmark for Evaluation of Punctuation and Capitalization Capabilities of end-to-end ASR Modelscited by 49
  5. 2021Subformer: Exploring Weight Sharing for Parameter Efficiency in Generative Transformerscited by 43
  6. 2025Encode, Think, Decode: Scaling test-time reasoning with recursive latent thoughtscited by 24
  7. 2026SMELT: Scaling Laws for Compute-Matched MoE Looped Transformerscited by 18
  8. 2024Fixed Point Diffusion Modelscited by 16
  9. 2026ELT: Elastic Looped Transformers for Visual Generationcited by 14
  10. 2026Loop the Loopies!cited by 8
  11. 2026Gated Recurrent Transformers: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulationcited by 4

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2026Staged Depth-Pruning Distillation of a Flow-Matching Text-to-Speech Teacher: A Compact Hindi Speech Synthesizer
  2. 2026DSFlow: Dual Supervision and Step-Aware Architecture for One-Step Flow Matching Speech Synthesis
  3. 2025Efficient Parallel Samplers for Recurrent-Depth Models and Their Connection to Diffusion Language Models
  4. 2023VoiceFlow: Efficient Text-to-Speech with Rectified Flow Matching
  5. 2026FlowEdit: Associative Memory for Lifelong Pronunciation Adaptation in Flow-Matching TTS
  6. 2026Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech
  7. 2025Shallow Flow Matching for Coarse-to-Fine Text-to-Speech Synthesis
  8. 2026Enhancing Flow Matching with A Unified Guidance Framework for Efficient and Robust Speech Synthesis