Fast Text-to-Audio Generation with Adversarial Post-Training

Text-to-audio systems, while increasingly performant, are slow at inference time, thus making their latency unpractical for many creative applications. We present Adversarial Relativistic-Contrastive (ARC) post-training, the first adversarial acceleration algorithm for diffusion/flow models not based on distillation. While past adversarial post-training methods have struggled to compare against their expensive distillation counterparts, ARC post-training is a simple procedure that (1) extends a recent relativistic adversarial formulation to diffusion/flow post-training and (2) combines it with a novel contrastive discriminator objective to encourage better prompt adherence. We pair ARC post-training with a number optimizations to Stable Audio Open and build a model capable of generating $\approx$12s of 44.1kHz stereo audio in $\approx$75ms on an H100, and $\approx$7s on a mobile edge-device, the fastest text-to-audio model to our knowledge.

@article{novack2025_2505.08175,
  title={ Fast Text-to-Audio Generation with Adversarial Post-Training },
  author={ Zachary Novack and Zach Evans and Zack Zukowski and Josiah Taylor and CJ Carr and Julian Parker and Adnan Al-Sinan and Gian Marco Iodice and Julian McAuley and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick and Jordi Pons },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.08175},
  year={ 2025 }
}