RLAIF-SPA: Optimizing LLM-based Emotional Speech Synthesis via RLAIF

ABSTRACT Text-To-Speech synthesis has achieved near-human quality in neutral speech, but emotional expressiveness remains a challenge. Existing methods often rely on costly emotion annotations or optimize indirect objectives that fail to capture the emotional expressiveness and perceptual naturalness of speech, leading to generated speech that is accurate but emotionally flat. To address these challenges, we propose the RLAIF-SPA framework, incorporating a Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) mechanism to employ Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Large Language Model (LLM) techniques to respectively judge semantic accuracy and prosodic-emotional label alignment as a direct reward for emotional expressiveness and intelligibility optimization. Specifically, it leverages Prosodic Label Alignment to enhance expressive quality by jointly considering semantic accuracy and prosodic-emotional alignment along four fine-grained dimensions: Structure, Emotion, Speed, and T one. In addition, it incorporates Semantic Accuracy Feedback to ensure the generation of clear and accurate speech. Experiments on the LibriSpeech dataset show that RLAIF-SP A outperforms Chat-TTS, with a 26.1% reduction in WER, a 9.1% increase in SIM-O, and over 10% improvement in human evaluation.