mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

NU-Wave: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Neural Audio Upsampling

arXiv 2104.02321 ↗First posted 6 Apr 2021eess.AS cs.AI cs.LGcited by 50

On the map: Diffusion models → Audio, speech and music

Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we introduce NU-Wave, the first neural audio upsampling model to produce waveforms of sampling rate 48kHz from coarse 16kHz or 24kHz inputs, while prior works could generate only up to 16kHz. NU-Wave is the first diffusion probabilistic model for audio super-resolution which is engineered based on neural vocoders. NU-Wave generates high-quality audio that achieves high performance in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), log-spectral distance (LSD), and accuracy of the ABX test. In all cases, NU-Wave outperforms the baseline models despite the substantially smaller model capacity (3.0M parameters) than baselines (5.4-21%). The audio samples of our model are available at https://mindslab-ai.github.io/nuwave, and the code will be made available soon.

Key facts. Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 22 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2021.

Builds on

22 of 32 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2020DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis21 Sep

Other references · 21

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 37,240
  3. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  4. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
  5. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  6. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
  7. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,058
  8. 2019Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distributioncited by 4,101
  9. 2016Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Networkcited by 1,908
  10. 2016WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audiocited by 1,722
  11. 2018ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 1,254
  12. 2020Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Modelscited by 1,043
9 more
  1. 2020WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generationcited by 622
  2. 2020PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Modelscited by 358
  3. 2018WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesiscited by 309
  4. 2018Efficient Neural Audio Synthesiscited by 219
  5. 2020Adversarial score matching and improved sampling for image generationcited by 96
  6. 2019WaveFlow: A Compact Flow-based Model for Raw Audiocited by 51
  7. 2019Temporal FiLM: Capturing Long-Range Sequence Dependencies with Feature-Wise Modulationscited by 36
  8. 2017Audio Super Resolution using Neural Networkscited by 26
  9. 2019Bandwidth Extension on Raw Audio via Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 10

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 12; 2023: 13; 2024: 6; 2025: 11; 2026: 5.

50 papers.

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  1. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  2. 2022A Survey on Generative Diffusion Modelcited by 240
  3. 2021On Fast Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 170
  4. 2023TRACT: Denoising Diffusion Models with Transitive Closure Time-Distillationcited by 116
  5. 2023Diffusion Models for Reinforcement Learning: A Surveycited by 91
  6. 2021PriorGrad: Improving Conditional Denoising Diffusion Models with Data-Dependent Adaptive Priorcited by 80
  7. 2022Universal Speech Enhancement with Score-based Diffusioncited by 75
  8. 2023A Survey on Audio Diffusion Models: Text To Speech Synthesis and Enhancement in Generative AIcited by 68
  9. 2023Multi-Source Diffusion Models for Simultaneous Music Generation and Separationcited by 63
  10. 2022Discrete Contrastive Diffusion for Cross-Modal Music and Image Generationcited by 44
  11. 2022Multi-instrument Music Synthesis with Spectrogram Diffusioncited by 42
  12. 2023AudioSR: Versatile Audio Super-resolution at Scalecited by 39
38 more
  1. 2022Neural Vocoder is All You Need for Speech Super-resolutioncited by 37
  2. 2022NU-Wave 2: A General Neural Audio Upsampling Model for Various Sampling Ratescited by 36
  3. 2022Analysing Diffusion-based Generative Approaches versus Discriminative Approaches for Speech Restorationcited by 34
  4. 2023Boundary Guided Learning-Free Semantic Control with Diffusion Modelscited by 23
  5. 2022Vision+X: A Survey on Multimodal Learning in the Light of Datacited by 22
  6. 2023Physics-Driven Diffusion Models for Impact Sound Synthesis from Videoscited by 22
  7. 2022Conditioning and Sampling in Variational Diffusion Models for Speech Super-Resolutioncited by 20
  8. 2024A Survey on Diffusion Models for Recommender Systemscited by 20
  9. 2025FLowHigh: Towards Efficient and High-Quality Audio Super-Resolution with Single-Step Flow Matchingcited by 18
  10. 2025Audio Super-Resolution with Latent Bridge Modelscited by 14
  11. 2023High-Quality Visually-Guided Sound Separation from Diverse Categoriescited by 11
  12. 2025A2SB: Audio-to-Audio Schrodinger Bridgescited by 11
  13. 2023DiffSDS: A language diffusion model for protein backbone inpainting under geometric conditions and constraintscited by 10
  14. 2024Wave-U-Mamba: An End-To-End Framework For High-Quality And Efficient Speech Super Resolutioncited by 9
  15. 2021TUNet: A Block-online Bandwidth Extension Model based on Transformers and Self-supervised Pretrainingcited by 8
  16. 2022PhaseAug: A Differentiable Augmentation for Speech Synthesis to Simulate One-to-Many Mappingcited by 8
  17. 2023mdctGAN: Taming transformer-based GAN for speech super-resolution with Modified DCT spectracited by 6
  18. 2024AIGC for Industrial Time Series: From Deep Generative Models to Large Generative Modelscited by 6
  19. 2025FlashSR: One-step Versatile Audio Super-resolution via Diffusion Distillationcited by 5
  20. 2024Vector Quantized Diffusion Model Based Speech Bandwidth Extensioncited by 4
  21. 2025ZeroSep: Separate Anything in Audio with Zero Trainingcited by 4
  22. 2025Inference-time Scaling for Diffusion-based Audio Super-resolutioncited by 3
  23. 2022Nonparallel High-Quality Audio Super Resolution with Domain Adaptation and Resampling CycleGANscited by 2
  24. 2025High-Quality Sound Separation Across Diverse Categories via Visually-Guided Generative Modelingcited by 2
  25. 2025Diffusion Models for Reinforcement Learning: Foundations, Taxonomy, and Developmentcited by 2
  26. 2025Efficient and Fast Generative-Based Singing Voice Separation using a Latent Diffusion Modelcited by 2
  27. 2023Guided Speech Enhancement Networkcited by 1
  28. 2023DETER: Detecting Edited Regions for Deterring Generative Manipulationscited by 1
  29. 2025A High-Fidelity Speech Super Resolution Network using a Complex Global Attention Module with Spectro-Temporal Losscited by 1
  30. 2026LatentFlowSR: High-Fidelity Audio Super-Resolution via Noise-Robust Latent Flow Matchingcited by 1
  31. 2023Score-based Conditional Generation with Fewer Labeled Data by Self-calibrating Classifier Guidancecited by 0
  32. 2024Tuning In: Analysis of Audio Classifier Performance in Clinical Settings with Limited Datacited by 0
  33. 2024Speech Bandwidth Expansion Via High Fidelity Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 0
  34. 2025SUBARU: A Practical Approach to Power Saving in Hearables Using SUB-Nyquist Audio Resolution Upsamplingcited by 0
  35. 2026FastWave: Optimized Diffusion Model for Audio Super-Resolutioncited by 0
  36. 2026VeRe-Flow: Guiding Flow Matching toward Clean Speech via Velocity Contrastive Regularization and Representation Alignment for Noise-Robust Bandwidth Expansioncited by 0
  37. 2026P2Flow: Phoneme-aware Progressive Flow Matching for Extreme Speech Super-Resolutioncited by 0
  38. 2026End-to-End Historical Music Restoration in Latent Spacecited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025WaveLLDM: Design and Development of a Lightweight Latent Diffusion Model for Speech Enhancement and Restoration
  2. 2025BridgeVoC: Revitalizing Neural Vocoder from a Restoration Perspective
  3. 2024PeriodGrad: Towards Pitch-Controllable Neural Vocoder Based on a Diffusion Probabilistic Model
  4. 2022SpecGrad: Diffusion Probabilistic Model based Neural Vocoder with Adaptive Noise Spectral Shaping
  5. 2024Diffusion Models for Audio Restoration
  6. 2023EDMSound: Spectrogram Based Diffusion Models for Efficient and High-Quality Audio Synthesis
  7. 2023From Discrete Tokens to High-Fidelity Audio Using Multi-Band Diffusion
  8. 2021Restoring degraded speech via a modified diffusion model