# Efficient Parallel Audio Generation using Group Masked Language Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01099 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01099/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06103/) (2021)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [NaturalSpeech 2: Latent Diffusion Models are Natural and Zero-Shot Speech and Singing Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09116/) (2023)
- [Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03540/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11084/) (2021)
- [SoundStorm: Efficient Parallel Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09636/) (2023)
- [HiFi-Codec: Group-residual Vector quantization for High Fidelity Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02765/) (2023)
- [VampNet: Music Generation via Masked Acoustic Token Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04686/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [MusicMagus: Zero-Shot Text-to-Music Editing via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06178/) (2024)
- [Voice Cloning: Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00579/) (2025)
- [SegINR: Segment-wise Implicit Neural Representation for Sequence Alignment in Neural Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04690/) (2024)
- [MusRec: Zero-Shot Text-to-Music Editing via Rectified Flow and Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04376/) (2025)
- [FlowSonic: Stable Zero-Shot Music Editing via High-Order Trajectory Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17526/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a fast and high-quality codec language model for parallel audio generation. While SoundStorm, a state-of-the-art parallel audio generation model, accelerates inference speed compared to autoregressive models, it still suffers from slow inference due to iterative sampling. To resolve this problem, we propose Group-Masked Language Modeling~(G-MLM) and Group Iterative Parallel Decoding~(G-IPD) for efficient parallel audio generation. Both the training and sampling schemes enable the model to synthesize high-quality audio with a small number of iterations by effectively modeling the group-wise conditional dependencies. In addition, our model employs a cross-attention-based architecture to capture the speaker style of the prompt voice and improves computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the baselines in prompt-based audio generation.