# Diffusion Timbre Transfer Via Mutual Information Guided Inpainting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2026.

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

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [Neural Audio Synthesis of Musical Notes with WaveNet Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01279/) (2017)
- [DDSP: Differentiable Digital Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04643/) (2020)
- [Noise2Music: Text-conditioned Music Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03917/) (2023)
- [Symbolic Music Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16091/) (2021)
- [ProDiff: Progressive Fast Diffusion Model For High-Quality Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06389/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Fast Maximum Likelihood Sampling Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13821/) (2021)
- [Music ControlNet: Multiple Time-varying Controls for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07069/) (2023)
- [DITTO: Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12179/) (2024)
- [TimbreTron: A WaveNet(CycleGAN(CQT(Audio))) Pipeline for Musical Timbre Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09620/) (2018)
- [Diff-A-Riff: Musical Accompaniment Co-creation via Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08384/) (2024)
- [Music2Latent: Consistency Autoencoders for Latent Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06500/) (2024)
- [Diff-HierVC: Diffusion-based Hierarchical Voice Conversion with Robust Pitch Generation and Masked Prior for Zero-shot Speaker Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04693/) (2023)
- [DITTO-2: Distilled Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20289/) (2024)
- [Ambient Diffusion Omni: Training Good Models with Bad Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10038/) (2025)
- [Editing Music with Melody and Text: Using ControlNet for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05151/) (2024)
- [Improving Musical Accompaniment Co-creation via Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23005/) (2024)
- [Music Style Transfer with Time-Varying Inversion of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13763/) (2024)
- [Latent Diffusion Bridges for Unsupervised Musical Audio Timbre Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06096/) (2024)
- [Modulated Variational auto-Encoders for many-to-many musical timbre transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00222/) (2018)
- [Timbre Transfer with Variational Auto Encoding and Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02096/) (2021)
- [Timbre transfer using image-to-image denoising diffusion implicit models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04586/) (2023)
- [LiLAC: A Lightweight Latent ControlNet for Musical Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11476/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [TADA! Tuning Audio Diffusion Models through Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11910/) (2026)
- [PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12282/) (2026)
- [Synthesis and editing of multi-instrument audio mixtures using scalar-quantised latents with MIDI Span conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25546/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study timbre transfer as an inference-time editing problem for music audio. Starting from a strong pre-trained latent diffusion model, we introduce a lightweight procedure that requires no additional training: (i) a dimension-wise noise injection that targets latent channels most informative of instrument identity, and (ii) an early-step clamping mechanism that re-imposes the input's melodic and rhythmic structure during reverse diffusion. The method operates directly on audio latents and is compatible with text/audio conditioning (e.g., CLAP). We discuss design choices,analyze trade-offs between timbral change and structural preservation, and show that simple inference-time controls can meaningfully steer pre-trained models for style-transfer use cases.