# SAO-Instruct: Free-form Audio Editing using Natural Language Instructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22795 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22795/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00341/) (2020)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [MusicLM: Generating Music From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11325/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [SDR - half-baked or well done?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02508/) (2018)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/) (2019)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [An Edit Friendly DDPM Noise Space: Inversion and Manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06140/) (2023)
- [NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03100/) (2024)
- [FMA: A Dataset For Music Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01840/) (2016)
- [StyleTTS 2: Towards Human-Level Text-to-Speech through Style Diffusion and Adversarial Training with Large Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07691/) (2023)
- [Meta Audiobox Aesthetics: Unified Automatic Quality Assessment for Speech, Music, and Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05139/) (2025)
- [VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05370/) (2024)
- [Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15821/) (2023)
- [TasNet: time-domain audio separation network for real-time, single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00541/) (2017)
- [The Benefit Of Temporally-Strong Labels In Audio Event Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07031/) (2021)
- [AUDIT: Audio Editing by Following Instructions with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00830/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Audio-Visual Intelligence in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04045/) (2026)
- [FreeSonic: Training-Free Temporal-Aware Decoupled Attention for Precise Audio Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15186/) (2026)
- [PC-Mix: Partial-Component Audio Spoofing Detection under Mixed Speech and Environmental Sound Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10345/) (2026)
- [SonicCaps: Large-Scale Diverse and Fine-Grained Captioning for Improved Audio-Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02343/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative models have made significant progress in synthesizing high-fidelity audio from short textual descriptions. However, editing existing audio using natural language has remained largely underexplored. Current approaches either require the complete description of the edited audio or are constrained to predefined edit instructions that lack flexibility. In this work, we introduce SAO-Instruct, a model based on Stable Audio Open capable of editing audio clips using any free-form natural language instruction. To train our model, we create a dataset of audio editing triplets (input audio, edit instruction, output audio) using Prompt-to-Prompt, DDPM inversion, and a manual editing pipeline. Although partially trained on synthetic data, our model generalizes well to real in-the-wild audio clips and unseen edit instructions. We demonstrate that SAO-Instruct achieves competitive performance on objective metrics and outperforms other audio editing approaches in a subjective listening study. To encourage future research, we release our code and model weights.