VoiceStar: Robust Zero-Shot Autoregressive TTS with Duration Control and Extrapolation

Puyuan Peng, Zhisheng Zheng, Shang-Wen Li, Abdelrahman Mohamed, David Harwath


Abstract
We present VoiceStar, the first zero-shot TTS model that achieves both output duration control and extrapolation. VoiceStar is an autoregressive encoder-decoder neural codec language model, that leverages a novel Progress-Monitoring Rotary Position Embedding (PM-RoPE) and is trained with Continuation-Prompt Mixed (CPM) training. PM-RoPE enables the model to better align text and speech tokens, indicates the target duration for the generated speech, and also allows the model to generate speech waveforms much longer in duration than those seen during training. CPM training also helps to mitigate the training/inference mismatch, and significantly improves the quality of the generated speech in terms of speaker similarity and intelligibility. VoiceStar outperforms or is on par with current state-of-the-art models on short-form benchmarks such as LibriSpeech and Seed-TTS, and significantly outperforms these models on long-form/extrapolation benchmarks (20-50s) in terms of intelligibility and naturalness. Code and model: https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceStar. Audio samples: https://jasonppy.github.io/VoiceStar_web.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.570
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
11737–11754
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.570/
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Cite (ACL):
Puyuan Peng, Zhisheng Zheng, Shang-Wen Li, Abdelrahman Mohamed, and David Harwath. 2026. VoiceStar: Robust Zero-Shot Autoregressive TTS with Duration Control and Extrapolation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 11737–11754, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VoiceStar: Robust Zero-Shot Autoregressive TTS with Duration Control and Extrapolation (Peng et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.570.pdf
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