Taming Data and Transformers for Audio Generation
This work solves data and scalability issues for ambient audio generation, though it is incremental with improvements in existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of scaling ambient sound generation by addressing data scarcity, caption quality, and model architecture limitations, resulting in a 1.25B parameter transformer model that improved FAD by 4.7%, IS by 11.1%, and CLAP by 13.5% over baselines.
The scalability of ambient sound generators is hindered by data scarcity, insufficient caption quality, and limited scalability in model architecture. This work addresses these challenges by advancing both data and model scaling. First, we propose an efficient and scalable dataset collection pipeline tailored for ambient audio generation, resulting in AutoReCap-XL, the largest ambient audio-text dataset with over 47 million clips. To provide high-quality textual annotations, we propose AutoCap, a high-quality automatic audio captioning model. By adopting a Q-Former module and leveraging audio metadata, AutoCap substantially enhances caption quality, reaching a CIDEr score of $83.2$, a $3.2\%$ improvement over previous captioning models. Finally, we propose GenAu, a scalable transformer-based audio generation architecture that we scale up to 1.25B parameters. We demonstrate its benefits from data scaling with synthetic captions as well as model size scaling. When compared to baseline audio generators trained at similar size and data scale, GenAu obtains significant improvements of $4.7\%$ in FAD score, $11.1\%$ in IS, and $13.5\%$ in CLAP score. Our code, model checkpoints, and dataset are publicly available.