@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-disco,
    title = "{D}is{C}o{\_}{S}peech: Controllable Zero-Shot Speech Generation with A Disentangled Speech Codec",
    author = "Li, Tao  and
      Ge, Wenshuo  and
      Wang, Zhichao  and
      Cui, Zihao  and
      Ma, Yong  and
      Gao, Yingying  and
      Deng, Chao  and
      Zhang, Shilei  and
      Feng, Junlan",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.863/",
    pages = "18917--18931",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Codec-based language models (LMs) have revolutionized text-to-speech (TTS). However, standard codecs entangle timbre and prosody, which hinders independent control in continuation-based LMs. To tackle this challenge, we propose DisCo-Speech, a zero-shot controllable TTS framework featuring a disentangled speech codec (DisCodec) and an LM-based generator. The core component DisCodec employs a two-stage design: 1) tri-factor disentanglement to separate speech into content, prosody, and timbre subspaces via parallel encoders and hybrid losses; and 2) fusion and reconstruction that merges content and prosody into unified content-prosody tokens suitable for LM prediction, while jointly optimizing reconstruction to address the disentanglement-reconstruction trade-off. This allows the LM to perform prosodic continuation from a style prompt while the decoder injects target timbre, enabling flexible zero-shot control. Experiments demonstrate that DisCo-Speech achieves competitive voice cloning and superior zero-shot prosody control. By resolving the core entanglement at the codec level, DisCo-Speech provides a robust foundation for controllable speech synthesis. Audio samples are available at: https://disco-speech.github.io/DisCo-demo/. Code and weights will be released at: https://github.com/disco-speech/DisCo-Speech upon acceptance."
}