# ACE-Step: A Step Towards Music Generation Foundation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00045 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00045/

## Key facts

- Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (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)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00341/) (2020)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [Deep Compression Autoencoder for Efficient High-Resolution Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10733/) (2024)
- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [UniMax: Fairer and more Effective Language Sampling for Large-Scale Multilingual Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09151/) (2023)
- [Meta Audiobox Aesthetics: Unified Automatic Quality Assessment for Speech, Music, and Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05139/) (2025)
- [Adapting Frechet Audio Distance for Generative Music Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01616/) (2023)
- [YuE: Scaling Open Foundation Models for Long-Form Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08638/) (2025)
- [MuQ: Self-Supervised Music Representation Learning with Mel Residual Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01108/) (2025)
- [mHuBERT-147: A Compact Multilingual HuBERT Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06371/) (2024)
- [ByT5 model for massively multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03067/) (2022)
- [DiffRhythm: Blazingly Fast and Embarrassingly Simple End-to-End Full-Length Song Generation with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01183/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Ovi: Twin Backbone Cross-Modal Fusion for Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01284/) (2025)
- [UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06155/) (2025)
- [LeVo: High-Quality Song Generation with Multi-Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07520/) (2025)
- [JavisDiT++: Unified Modeling and Optimization for Joint Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19163/) (2026)
- [SongBloom: Coherent Song Generation via Interleaved Autoregressive Sketching and Diffusion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07634/) (2025)
- [DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12160/) (2026)
- [DiffRhythm 2: Efficient and High Fidelity Song Generation via Block Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22950/) (2025)
- [AudioGen-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Video-Synchronized Audio, Speech, and Song Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00733/) (2025)
- [Live Music Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04651/) (2025)
- [JAM: A Tiny Flow-based Song Generator with Fine-grained Controllability and Aesthetic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20880/) (2025)
- [Music Arena: Live Evaluation for Text-to-Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20900/) (2025)
- [Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03973/) (2026)
- [SingMOS-Pro: An Comprehensive Benchmark for Singing Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01812/) (2025)
- [Learning Interpretable Features in Audio Latent Spaces via Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23802/) (2025)
- [MM-Sonate: Multimodal Controllable Audio-Video Generation with Zero-Shot Voice Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01568/) (2026)
- [SongBench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Aspect Benchmark for Song Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25937/) (2026)
- [OmniNFT: Modality-wise Omni Diffusion Reinforcement for Joint Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12480/) (2026)
- [LeVo 2: Stable and Melodious Song Generation via Hierarchical Representation Modeling and Progressive Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30642/) (2026)
- [InstructAudio: Unified speech and music generation with natural language instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18487/) (2025)
- [CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00610/) (2026)
- [TADA! Tuning Audio Diffusion Models through Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11910/) (2026)
- [Improving Joint Audio-Video Generation with Cross-Modal Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18600/) (2026)
- [TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17006/) (2026)
- [Pushing the Frontier of Full-Song Generation: Hierarchical Autoregressive Planning Meets Flow-Matching Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20253/) (2026)
- [LongCat-AudioDiT: High-Fidelity Diffusion Text-to-Speech in the Waveform Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29339/) (2026)
- [AnyAudio-Judge: A Dynamic Rubric-Based Benchmark and Evaluator for Audio Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03116/) (2026)
- [SentinelBench: A Benchmark for Long-Running Monitoring Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05342/) (2026)
- [AnyAccomp: Generalizable Accompaniment Generation via Quantized Melodic Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14052/) (2025)
- [UniTalking: A Unified Audio-Video Framework for Talking Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01418/) (2026)
- [V2M-Zero: Zero-Pair Time-Aligned Video-to-Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11042/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce ACE-Step, a novel open-source foundation model for music generation that overcomes key limitations of existing approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance through a holistic architectural design. Current methods face inherent trade-offs between generation speed, musical coherence, and controllability. For example, LLM-based models (e.g. Yue, SongGen) excel at lyric alignment but suffer from slow inference and structural artifacts. Diffusion models (e.g. DiffRhythm), on the other hand, enable faster synthesis but often lack long-range structural coherence. ACE-Step bridges this gap by integrating diffusion-based generation with Sana's Deep Compression AutoEncoder (DCAE) and a lightweight linear transformer. It also leverages MERT and m-hubert to align semantic representations (REPA) during training, allowing rapid convergence. As a result, our model synthesizes up to 4 minutes of music in just 20 seconds on an A100 GPU-15x faster than LLM-based baselines-while achieving superior musical coherence and lyric alignment across melody, harmony, and rhythm metrics. Moreover, ACE-Step preserves fine-grained acoustic details, enabling advanced control mechanisms such as voice cloning, lyric editing, remixing, and track generation (e.g. lyric2vocal, singing2accompaniment). Rather than building yet another end-to-end text-to-music pipeline, our vision is to establish a foundation model for music AI: a fast, general-purpose, efficient yet flexible architecture that makes it easy to train subtasks on top of it. This paves the way for the development of powerful tools that seamlessly integrate into the creative workflows of music artists, producers, and content creators. In short, our goal is to build a stable diffusion moment for music. The code, the model weights and the demo are available at: https://ace-step.github.io/.