Adversarial Contrastive Predictive Coding for Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations
In this work we tackle disentanglement of speaker and content related variations in speech signals. We propose a fully convolutional variational autoencoder employing two encoders: a content encoder and a speaker encoder. To foster disentanglement we propose adversarial contrastive predictive coding. This new disentanglement method does neither need parallel data nor any supervision, not even speaker labels. With successful disentanglement the model is able to perform voice conversion by recombining content and speaker attributes. Due to the speaker encoder which learns to extract speaker traits from an audio signal, the proposed model not only provides meaningful speaker embeddings but is also able to perform zero-shot voice conversion, i.e. with previously unseen source and target speakers. Compared to state-of-the-art disentanglement approaches we show competitive disentanglement and voice conversion performance for speakers seen during training and superior performance for unseen speakers.
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