# Auffusion: Leveraging the Power of Diffusion and Large Language Models for Text-to-Audio Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01044 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01044/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 48 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Clotho: An Audio Captioning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09387/) (2019)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12661/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [MMAudio: Taming Multimodal Joint Training for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15322/) (2024)
- [FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01494/) (2024)
- [TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21037/) (2024)
- [Video-Guided Foley Sound Generation with Multimodal Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17698/) (2024)
- [Taming Data and Transformers for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19388/) (2024)
- [LAFMA: A Latent Flow Matching Model for Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08203/) (2024)
- [KAD: No More FAD! An Effective and Efficient Evaluation Metric for Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15602/) (2025)
- [MMDisCo: Multi-Modal Discriminator-Guided Cooperative Diffusion for Joint Audio and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17842/) (2024)
- [From Specific-MLLMs to Omni-MLLMs: A Survey on MLLMs Aligned with Multi-modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11694/) (2024)
- [AV-Link: Temporally-Aligned Diffusion Features for Cross-Modal Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15191/) (2024)
- [Improving Text-To-Audio Models with Synthetic Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15487/) (2024)
- [BATON: Aligning Text-to-Audio Model with Human Preference Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00744/) (2024)
- [Images that Sound: Composing Images and Sounds on a Single Canvas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12221/) (2024)
- [ETTA: Elucidating the Design Space of Text-to-Audio Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19351/) (2024)
- [Token Perturbation Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10036/) (2025)
- [UnifiedMLLM: Enabling Unified Representation for Multi-modal Multi-tasks With Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02503/) (2024)
- [AudioEditor: A Training-Free Diffusion-Based Audio Editing Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12466/) (2024)
- [Editing Music with Melody and Text: Using ControlNet for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05151/) (2024)
- [SEE-2-SOUND: Zero-Shot Spatial Environment-to-Spatial Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06612/) (2024)
- [Causal Agent based on Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06849/) (2024)
- [VoiceDiT: Dual-Condition Diffusion Transformer for Environment-Aware Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19259/) (2024)
- [Synchronized Video-to-Audio Generation via Mel Quantization-Continuum Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06984/) (2025)
- [Audio-Agent: Leveraging LLMs For Audio Generation, Editing and Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03335/) (2024)
- [Language Model Based Text-to-Audio Generation: Anti-Causally Aligned Collaborative Residual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04577/) (2025)
- [Challenge on Sound Scene Synthesis: Evaluating Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17589/) (2024)
- [RFLAV: Rolling Flow matching for infinite Audio Video generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08307/) (2025)
- [YingSound: Video-Guided Sound Effects Generation with Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09168/) (2024)
- [Steering Language Model to Stable Speech Emotion Recognition via Contextual Perception and Chain of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18186/) (2025)
- [Random Conditioning with Distillation for Data-Efficient Diffusion Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02011/) (2025)
- [ReelWave: Multi-Agentic Movie Sound Generation through Multimodal LLM Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07217/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in diffusion models and large language models (LLMs) have significantly propelled the field of AIGC. Text-to-Audio (TTA), a burgeoning AIGC application designed to generate audio from natural language prompts, is attracting increasing attention. However, existing TTA studies often struggle with generation quality and text-audio alignment, especially for complex textual inputs. Drawing inspiration from state-of-the-art Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models, we introduce Auffusion, a TTA system adapting T2I model frameworks to TTA task, by effectively leveraging their inherent generative strengths and precise cross-modal alignment. Our objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that Auffusion surpasses previous TTA approaches using limited data and computational resource. Furthermore, previous studies in T2I recognizes the significant impact of encoder choice on cross-modal alignment, like fine-grained details and object bindings, while similar evaluation is lacking in prior TTA works. Through comprehensive ablation studies and innovative cross-attention map visualizations, we provide insightful assessments of text-audio alignment in TTA. Our findings reveal Auffusion's superior capability in generating audios that accurately match textual descriptions, which further demonstrated in several related tasks, such as audio style transfer, inpainting and other manipulations. Our implementation and demos are available at https://auffusion.github.io.