Why wouldn’t that be one-shot voice cloning? The concept of calling it zero shot doesn’t really make sense to me.
As with other replies, yes this is a silly name.
I would caution that using the term "example" suggests further learning happens at inference-time, which isn't the case.
For LLMs, the entire prompt is the input and conveys both the style and the content vectors. In zero-shot voice cloning, we provide the exact same inputs vectors but just decoupled. Providing reference audio is no different than including "Answer in the style of Sir Isaac Newton" in an LLM's prompt. The model doesn't 'learn' the voice; it simply applies the style vector to the content during the forward pass.
If you actually stopped and fine-tuned the model weights on that single clip, that would be one-shot learning.
In the olden days of 2023, you didn’t just find instruct-tuned models sitting on every shelf.
You could use a base model that has only undergone pretraining and can only generate text continuations based on the input it receives. If you provided the model with several examples of a question followed by an answer, and then provided a new question followed by a blank for the next answer, the model understood from the context that it needed to answer the question. This is the most primitive use of ICL, and a very basic way to achieve limited instruction following behavior.
With this few-shot example, I would call that few-shot ICL. Not zero shot, even though the model weights are locked.
But, I am learning that it is technically called zero shot, and I will accept this, even if I think it is a confusingly named concept.
It makes perfect sense; you are simply confusing training samples with inference context. "Zero-shot" refers to zero gradient updates (retraining) required to handle a new class. It does not mean "zero input information."
> how would the model know what voice it should sound like
It uses the reference audio just like a text based model uses a prompt.
> unless it's a celebrity voice or similar included in the training data where it's enough to specify a name
If the voice is in the training data, that is literally the opposite of zero-shot. The entire point of zero-shot is that the model has never encountered the speaker before.
Thus if you feed a the model target voice, ie an example of the desired output vouce, it sure seems like it should be classified as one-shot.
However it seems the zero-shot in voice cloning is relative to learning, and in contrast to one-shot learning[1].
So a bit overloaded term causing confusion from what I can gather.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-shot_learning_(computer_vi...
In voice cloning, the reference audio is simply the input, not a training example. You wouldn't say an image classifier is doing "one-shot learning" just because you fed it one image to classify. That image is the input. Similarly, the reference audio is the input that conditions the generation. It is zero-shot because the model's weights were never optimized for that specific speaker's manifold.
If you didn't do that (because you have 100 hours of other people talking), that's zero-shots, no?
No, that would still be zero shot. Providing inference-time context (in this case, audio) is no different than giving a prompt to an LLM. Think of it as analogous to an AGENTS.md included in a prompt. You're not retraining the model, you're simply putting the rest of the prompt into context.
If you actually stopped and fine-tuned the model weights on that single clip, that would be one-shot learning.
Right... And you have 0-shot prompts ("give me a list of animals"), 1-shot prompts ("give me a list of animals, for example: a cat"), 2-shot prompts ("give me a list of animals, for example: a cat; a dog"), etc.
The "shot" refers to how many examples are provided to the LLM in the prompt, and have nothing to do with training or tuning, in every context I've ever seen.
> The "shot" refers to how many examples are provided to the LLM in the prompt, and have nothing to do with training or tuning, in every context I've ever seen.
In formal ML, "shot" refers to the number of samples available for a specific class during the training phase. You're describing a colloquial usage of the term found only in prompt engineering.
You can't apply an LLMism to a voice cloning model where standard ML definitions apply.