# Training-Efficient Text-to-Music Generation with State-Space Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14786 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14786/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
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- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Combining Recurrent, Convolutional, and Continuous-time Models with Linear State-Space Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13985/) (2021)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (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)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19887/) (2024)
- [Efficient Training of Audio Transformers with Patchout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05069/) (2021)
- [Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04825/) (2024)
- [Samba: Simple Hybrid State Space Models for Efficient Unlimited Context Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07522/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Transformers for Music Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08553/) (2022)
- [Efficient Training of Visual Transformers with Small Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03746/) (2021)
- [Mustango: Toward Controllable Text-to-Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08355/) (2023)
- [LP-MusicCaps: LLM-Based Pseudo Music Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16372/) (2023)
- [SiMBA: Simplified Mamba-Based Architecture for Vision and Multivariate Time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15360/) (2024)
- [Mousai: Text-to-Music Generation with Long-Context Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11757/) (2023)
- [DITTO: Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12179/) (2024)
- [YuE: Scaling Open Foundation Models for Long-Form Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08638/) (2025)
- [The Song Describer Dataset: a Corpus of Audio Captions for Music-and-Language Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10057/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in text-to-music generation (TTM) have yielded high-quality results, but often at the cost of extensive compute and the use of large proprietary internal data. To improve the affordability and openness of TTM training, an open-source generative model backbone that is more training- and data-efficient is needed. In this paper, we constrain the number of trainable parameters in the generative model to match that of the MusicGen-small benchmark (with about 300M parameters), and replace its Transformer backbone with the emerging class of state-space models (SSMs). Specifically, we explore different SSM variants for sequence modeling, and compare a single-stage SSM-based design with a decomposable two-stage SSM/diffusion hybrid design. All proposed models are trained from scratch on a purely public dataset comprising 457 hours of CC-licensed music, ensuring full openness. Our experimental findings are three-fold. First, we show that SSMs exhibit superior training efficiency compared to the Transformer counterpart. Second, despite using only 9% of the FLOPs and 2% of the training data size compared to the MusicGen-small benchmark, our model achieves competitive performance in both objective metrics and subjective listening tests based on MusicCaps captions. Finally, our scaling-down experiment demonstrates that SSMs can maintain competitive performance relative to the Transformer baseline even at the same training budget (measured in iterations), when the model size is reduced to four times smaller. To facilitate the democratization of TTM research, the processed captions, model checkpoints, and source code are available on GitHub via the project page: https://lonian6.github.io/ssmttm/.