# FreeAudio: Training-Free Timing Planning for Controllable Long-Form Text-to-Audio Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [MultiDiffusion: Fusing Diffusion Paths for Controlled Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08113/) (2023)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [MusicLM: Generating Music From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11325/) (2023)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00475/) (2020)
- [Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12661/) (2023)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [Masked Autoencoders that Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06405/) (2022)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09983/) (2022)
- [Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11708/) (2024)
- [Stable Audio Open](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14358/) (2024)
- [Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04825/) (2024)
- [UniAudio: An Audio Foundation Model Toward Universal Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00704/) (2023)
- [Long-form music generation with latent diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10301/) (2024)
- [The Benefit Of Temporally-Strong Labels In Audio Event Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07031/) (2021)
- [TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21037/) (2024)
- [Both Ears Wide Open: Towards Language-Driven Spatial Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10676/) (2024)
- [AudioTime: A Temporally-aligned Audio-text Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02857/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [JavisDiT++: Unified Modeling and Optimization for Joint Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19163/) (2026)
- [Audio Super-Resolution with Latent Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17609/) (2025)
- [ControlAudio: Tackling Text-Guided, Timing-Indicated and Intelligible Audio Generation via Progressive Diffusion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08878/) (2025)
- [Omni2Sound: Towards Unified Video-Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02731/) (2026)
- [AudioMoG: Guiding Audio Generation with Mixture-of-Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23727/) (2025)
- [RefineBridge: Generative Bridge Models Improve Financial Forecasting by Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21572/) (2025)
- [DreamAudio: Customized Text-to-Audio Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06027/) (2025)
- [Audio ControlNet for Fine-Grained Audio Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04680/) (2026)
- [GuidedBridge: Training-freely Improving Bridge Models with Prior Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03119/) (2026)
- [DegDiT: Controllable Audio Generation with Dynamic Event Graph Guided Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13786/) (2025)
- [ReasonAudio: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Beyond Matching in Text-Audio Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03361/) (2026)
- [AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12555/) (2026)
- [FreeSonic: Training-Free Temporal-Aware Decoupled Attention for Precise Audio Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15186/) (2026)
- [AV-SyncBench: Decoupled Benchmarking of Temporal and Semantic Audio-Visual Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00726/) (2026)
- [Investigating Group Relative Policy Optimization for Diffusion Transformer based Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01565/) (2026)
- [Unified Synthesis of Compositional Speech and Sound from Free-Form Text Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28063/) (2026)
- [SegTune: Structured and Fine-Grained Control for Song Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02638/) (2026)
- [SonicWeave: Chunk-Routed Mixture-of-Experts for Unified Audio Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09571/) (2026)
- [TimeSteer: Inference-Time Speech Scheduling in Joint Audio-Visual Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01277/) (2026)
- [SR-Edit: Region-Aware Image Editing via Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02504/) (2026)
- [Soundwich: Video Generation with Layered and Controllable Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-audio (T2A) generation has achieved promising results with the recent advances in generative models. However, because of the limited quality and quantity of temporally-aligned audio-text pairs, existing T2A methods struggle to handle the complex text prompts that contain precise timing control, e.g., "owl hooted at 2.4s-5.2s". Recent works have explored data augmentation techniques or introduced timing conditions as model inputs to enable timing-conditioned 10-second T2A generation, while their synthesis quality is still limited. In this work, we propose a novel training-free timing-controlled T2A framework, FreeAudio, making the first attempt to enable timing-controlled long-form T2A generation, e.g., "owl hooted at 2.4s-5.2s and crickets chirping at 0s-24s". Specifically, we first employ an LLM to plan non-overlapping time windows and recaption each with a refined natural language description, based on the input text and timing prompts. Then we introduce: 1) Decoupling and Aggregating Attention Control for precise timing control; 2) Contextual Latent Composition for local smoothness and Reference Guidance for global consistency. Extensive experiments show that: 1) FreeAudio achieves state-of-the-art timing-conditioned T2A synthesis quality among training-free methods and is comparable to leading training-based methods; 2) FreeAudio demonstrates comparable long-form generation quality with training-based Stable Audio and paves the way for timing-controlled long-form T2A synthesis. Demo samples are available at: https://freeaudio.github.io/FreeAudio/