Expected Learning Rate When Training From Scratch

Hello,

I’m training a model from scratch using a voice from the libri_tts dataset. I’ve been training on a 980ti for roughly five days now. After about a thousand epochs and thirty thousand steps, the generated voice sounds human, but almost as if it’s speaking another language.
I’m curious as to whether my rate of training given my GPU is standard, since others seem to have had far more steps in less time. I know the VRAM is being utilized consistently, so it’s not completely idle. My second question is whether my model should be intelligible at this point, given that 30k is the number I’ve seen thrown around as the point the model should be usable. The TrainAudio sounds pretty good and has tight alignment, but the TestAudio is fairly lackluster and has been since around 15k. Any advice is appreciated.


{
    "model": "Tacotron",
    "run_name": "libri_tts",
    "run_description": "tacotron",

    // AUDIO PARAMETERS
    "audio":{
        // stft parameters
        "num_freq": 513,         // number of stft frequency levels. Size of the linear spectogram frame.
        "win_length": 1024,      // stft window length in ms.
        "hop_length": 256,       // stft window hop-lengh in ms.
        "frame_length_ms": null, // stft window length in ms.If null, 'win_length' is used.
        "frame_shift_ms": null,  // stft window hop-lengh in ms. If null, 'hop_length' is used.

        // Audio processing parameters
        "sample_rate": 24000,   // DATASET-RELATED: wav sample-rate. If different than the original data, it is resampled.
        "preemphasis": 0.0,     // pre-emphasis to reduce spec noise and make it more structured. If 0.0, no -pre-emphasis.
        "ref_level_db": 20,     // reference level db, theoretically 20db is the sound of air.

        // Silence trimming
        "do_trim_silence": false,// enable trimming of slience of audio as you load it. LJspeech (false), TWEB (false), Nancy (true)
        "trim_db": 60,          // threshold for timming silence. Set this according to your dataset.

        // Griffin-Lim
        "power": 1.5,           // value to sharpen wav signals after GL algorithm.
        "griffin_lim_iters": 60,// #griffin-lim iterations. 30-60 is a good range. Larger the value, slower the generation.

        // MelSpectrogram parameters
        "num_mels": 80,         // size of the mel spec frame.
        "mel_fmin": 0.0,        // minimum freq level for mel-spec. ~50 for male and ~95 for female voices. Tune for dataset!!
        "mel_fmax": 8000.0,     // maximum freq level for mel-spec. Tune for dataset!!

        // Normalization parameters
        "signal_norm": true,    // normalize spec values. Mean-Var normalization if 'stats_path' is defined otherwise range normalization defined by the other params.
        "min_level_db": -100,   // lower bound for normalization
        "symmetric_norm": true, // move normalization to range [-1, 1]
        "max_norm": 4.0,        // scale normalization to range [-max_norm, max_norm] or [0, max_norm]
        "clip_norm": true,      // clip normalized values into the range.
        "stats_path": null    // DO NOT USE WITH MULTI_SPEAKER MODEL. scaler stats file computed by 'compute_statistics.py'. If it is defined, mean-std based notmalization is used and other normalization params are ignored
    },

    // VOCABULARY PARAMETERS
    // if custom character set is not defined,
    // default set in symbols.py is used
    // "characters":{
    //     "pad": "_",
    //     "eos": "~",
    //     "bos": "^",
    //     "characters": "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz!'(),-.:;? ",
    //     "punctuations":"!'(),-.:;? ",
    //     "phonemes":"iyɨʉɯuɪʏʊeøɘəɵɤoɛœɜɞʌɔæɐaɶɑɒᵻʘɓǀɗǃʄǂɠǁʛpbtdʈɖcɟkɡqɢʔɴŋɲɳnɱmʙrʀⱱɾɽɸβfvθðszʃʒʂʐçʝxɣχʁħʕhɦɬɮʋɹɻjɰlɭʎʟˈˌːˑʍwɥʜʢʡɕʑɺɧɚ˞ɫ"
    // },

    // DISTRIBUTED TRAINING
    "distributed":{
        "backend": "nccl",
        "url": "tcp:\/\/localhost:54321"
    },

    "reinit_layers": [],    // give a list of layer names to restore from the given checkpoint. If not defined, it reloads all heuristically matching layers.

    // TRAINING
    "batch_size": 32,       // Batch size for training. Lower values than 32 might cause hard to learn attention. It is overwritten by 'gradual_training'.
    "eval_batch_size":16,
    "r": 7,                 // Number of decoder frames to predict per iteration. Set the initial values if gradual training is enabled.
    "gradual_training": [[0, 7, 64], [1, 5, 64], [50000, 3, 32], [130000, 2, 32], [290000, 1, 32]], //set gradual training steps [first_step, r, batch_size]. If it is null, gradual training is disabled. For Tacotron, you might need to reduce the 'batch_size' as you proceeed.
    "loss_masking": true,         // enable / disable loss masking against the sequence padding.
    "ga_alpha": 10.0,        // weight for guided attention loss. If > 0, guided attention is enabled.

    // VALIDATION
    "run_eval": true,
    "test_delay_epochs": 10,  //Until attention is aligned, testing only wastes computation time.
    "test_sentences_file": null,  // set a file to load sentences to be used for testing. If it is null then we use default english sentences.

    // OPTIMIZER
    "noam_schedule": false,        // use noam warmup and lr schedule.
    "grad_clip": 1.0,              // upper limit for gradients for clipping.
    "epochs": 10000,                // total number of epochs to train.
    "lr": 0.0001,                  // Initial learning rate. If Noam decay is active, maximum learning rate.
    "wd": 0.000001,                // Weight decay weight.
    "warmup_steps": 4000,          // Noam decay steps to increase the learning rate from 0 to "lr"
    "seq_len_norm": false,         // Normalize eash sample loss with its length to alleviate imbalanced datasets. Use it if your dataset is small or has skewed distribution of sequence lengths.

    // TACOTRON PRENET
    "memory_size": -1,             // ONLY TACOTRON - size of the memory queue used fro storing last decoder predictions for auto-regression. If < 0, memory queue is disabled and decoder only uses the last prediction frame.
    "prenet_type": "original",     // "original" or "bn".
    "prenet_dropout": true,        // enable/disable dropout at prenet.

    // ATTENTION
    "attention_type": "original",  // 'original' or 'graves'
    "attention_heads": 4,          // number of attention heads (only for 'graves')
    "attention_norm": "sigmoid",   // softmax or sigmoid. Suggested to use softmax for Tacotron2 and sigmoid for Tacotron.
    "windowing": false,            // Enables attention windowing. Used only in eval mode.
    "use_forward_attn": false,     // if it uses forward attention. In general, it aligns faster.
    "forward_attn_mask": false,    // Additional masking forcing monotonicity only in eval mode.
    "transition_agent": false,     // enable/disable transition agent of forward attention.
    "location_attn": true,         // enable_disable location sensitive attention. It is enabled for TACOTRON by default.
    "bidirectional_decoder": false,  // use https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.09006. Use it, if attention does not work well with your dataset.

    // STOPNET
    "stopnet": true,               // Train stopnet predicting the end of synthesis.
    "separate_stopnet": true,      // Train stopnet seperately if 'stopnet==true'. It prevents stopnet loss to influence the rest of the model. It causes a better model, but it trains SLOWER.

    // TENSORBOARD and LOGGING
    "print_step": 25,       // Number of steps to log traning on console.
    "print_eval": false,     // If True, it prints intermediate loss values in evalulation.
    "save_step": 10000,      // Number of training steps expected to save traninpg stats and checkpoints.
    "checkpoint": true,     // If true, it saves checkpoints per "save_step"
    "tb_model_param_stats": false,     // true, plots param stats per layer on tensorboard. Might be memory consuming, but good for debugging.

    // DATA LOADING
    "text_cleaner": "phoneme_cleaners",
    "enable_eos_bos_chars": false, // enable/disable beginning of sentence and end of sentence chars.
    "num_loader_workers": 4,        // number of training data loader processes. Don't set it too big. 4-8 are good values.
    "num_val_loader_workers": 4,    // number of evaluation data loader processes.
    "batch_group_size": 0,  //Number of batches to shuffle after bucketing.
    "min_seq_len": 6,       // DATASET-RELATED: minimum text length to use in training
    "max_seq_len": 153,     // DATASET-RELATED: maximum text length

    // PATHS
    "output_path": "A:\\Other\\Installations\\chatbot\\Speech_Synthesis\\TTS\\Outputs",

    // PHONEMES
    "phoneme_cache_path": "A:\\Other\\Installations\\chatbot\\Speech_Synthesis\\TTS\\Outputs",  // phoneme computation is slow, therefore, it caches results in the given folder.
    "use_phonemes": false,           // use phonemes instead of raw characters. It is suggested for better pronounciation.
    "phoneme_language": "en-us",     // depending on your target language, pick one from  https://github.com/bootphon/phonemizer#languages

    // MULTI-SPEAKER and GST
    "use_speaker_embedding": false,     // use speaker embedding to enable multi-speaker learning.
    "style_wav_for_test": null,          // path to style wav file to be used in TacotronGST inference.
    "use_gst": false,       // TACOTRON ONLY: use global style tokens

    // DATASETS
    "datasets":   // List of datasets. They all merged and they get different speaker_ids.
        [
            {
                "name": "libri_tts",
                "path": "A:\\Other\\Installations\\chatbot\\Speech_Synthesis\\TTS\\RC_Voice_Source",
                "meta_file_train": null,
                "meta_file_val": null
            }
        ]

}

Hi @LegendBegins it’s hard to give firm answers but there are a couple of things I’d look at.

You mention you’re training with a voice from LibriTTS - what’s the rough amount of audio you’ve got to train with there? It’ll vary but if you’re training from scratch I’d have aimed for having at least 10 hours.
Also is your speaker’s voice a fairly consistent style during the narration? (more consistent will help the model learn)

The other point to note is that you’ve turned off use_phonemes - generally for English I’d advise having that on; there are so many quirks to English pronunciation that unless you’ve got a substantial diverse amount of speech transcribed the differing pronunciation may again cause a challenge to the model.

Thanks for taking a look at this for me—I think you pinpointed the issue. My dataset has far less than ten hours of audio. Fine tuning an existing model may be a better solution, in that case.

Good catch with the use_phonemes setting. I appreciate it.

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