Depth through recurrence: Looped transformers for flow-matching TTS

Abstract

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.