Stable Audio 3
On the map: Diffusion models → Audio, speech and music
Abstract (arXiv)
Stable Audio 3 is a family of fast latent diffusion models (small, medium, large) for variable-length audio generation and editing. Since our models can generate several minutes of audio, variable-length generations are key to avoid the cost of producing full-length generations for short sounds. We also support inpainting, enabling targeted audio editing and the continuation of short recordings. Our latent diffusion models operate on top of a novel semantic-acoustic autoencoder that projects audio into a compact latent space, enabling efficient diffusion-based generation while preserving audio fidelity and encouraging semantic structure in the latent. Finally, we run adversarial post-training to both accelerate inference and improve generation quality, reducing the number of inference steps while improving fidelity and prompt adherence. Stable Audio 3 models are trained on licensed and Creative Commons data to generate music and sounds in less than a 2s on an H200 GPU and less than a few seconds on a MacBook Pro M4. We release the weights of small and medium, that can run on consumer-grade hardware, together with their training and inference pipeline.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 80 of its 91 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.
Builds on
80 of 91 references.
Closest ancestors · 21
Same direction, newest first
- 2025DiffRhythm 2: Efficient and High Fidelity Song Generation via Block Flow Matching27 Oct
- 2025Audio Palette: A Diffusion Transformer with Multi-Signal Conditioning for Controllable Foley Synthesis14 Oct
- 2025Back to Ear: Perceptually Driven High Fidelity Music Reconstruction18 Sep
- 2025JAM: A Tiny Flow-based Song Generator with Fine-grained Controllability and Aesthetic Alignment28 Jul
- 2025DiffRhythm: Blazingly Fast and Embarrassingly Simple End-to-End Full-Length Song Generation with Latent Diffusion3 Mar
- 2025InspireMusic: Integrating Super Resolution and Large Language Model for High-Fidelity Long-Form Music Generation28 Feb
- 2024TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization30 Dec
- 2024Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation7 Oct
- 2024High Fidelity Text-Guided Music Editing via Single-Stage Flow Matching4 Jul
- 2024AudioLCM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Consistency Models1 Jun
- 2024DITTO-2: Distilled Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation30 May
- 2024Long-form music generation with latent diffusion16 Apr
9 more
- 2024Tango 2: Aligning Diffusion-based Text-to-Audio Generations through Direct Preference Optimization15 Apr
- 2024DITTO: Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation22 Jan
- 2023Controllable Music Production with Diffusion Models and Guidance Gradients1 Nov
- 2023AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining10 Aug
- 2023JEN-1: Text-Guided Universal Music Generation with Omnidirectional Diffusion Models9 Aug
- 2023MusicLDM: Enhancing Novelty in Text-to-Music Generation Using Beat-Synchronous Mixup Strategies3 Aug
- 2023Text-to-Audio Generation using Instruction-Tuned LLM and Latent Diffusion Model24 Apr
- 2023AUDIT: Audio Editing by Following Instructions with Latent Diffusion Models3 Apr
- 2023AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models29 Jan
Other references · 59
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2021RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embeddingcited by 4,703
- 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,356
- 2024Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,181
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
- 2023FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioningcited by 2,598
- 2013Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distancescited by 2,316
- 2023Consistency Modelscited by 1,822
- 2020GLU Variants Improve Transformercited by 1,804
- 2021Variational Diffusion Modelscited by 1,153
38 more
- 2024DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Modelcited by 1,135
- 2022Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolantscited by 995
- 2023Vision Transformers Need Registerscited by 871
- 2023Adversarial Diffusion Distillationcited by 759
- 2022High Fidelity Neural Audio Compressioncited by 687
- 2024Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesiscited by 684
- 2019PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognitioncited by 574
- 2021Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANscited by 516
- 2023Simple and Controllable Music Generationcited by 488
- 2023Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusioncited by 459
- 2023MusicLM: Generating Music From Textcited by 448
- 2023High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGANcited by 431
- 2023Simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution imagescited by 422
- 2021Knowledge Distillation in Iterative Generative Models for Improved Sampling Speedcited by 348
- 2024PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generationcited by 329
- 2024Hunyuan-DiT: A Powerful Multi-Resolution Diffusion Transformer with Fine-Grained Chinese Understandingcited by 298
- 2022AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generationcited by 295
- 2025Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoderscited by 295
- 2024Simplifying, Stabilizing and Scaling Continuous-Time Consistency Modelscited by 283
- 2020Query-Key Normalization for Transformerscited by 280
- 2024Fast High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Adversarial Diffusion Distillationcited by 279
- 2018The relativistic discriminator: a key element missing from standard GANcited by 238
- 2023On the Importance of Noise Scheduling for Diffusion Modelscited by 194
- 2024Fast Timing-Conditioned Latent Audio Diffusioncited by 181
- 2023UFOGen: You Forward Once Large Scale Text-to-Image Generation via Diffusion GANscited by 166
- 2024Hyper-SD: Trajectory Segmented Consistency Model for Efficient Image Synthesiscited by 156
- 2025Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generationcited by 151
- 2023Adapting Frechet Audio Distance for Generative Music Evaluationcited by 92
- 2025SANA-Sprint: One-Step Diffusion with Continuous-Time Consistency Distillationcited by 87
- 2023Music ControlNet: Multiple Time-varying Controls for Music Generationcited by 83
- 2024Distilling Diffusion Models into Conditional GANscited by 78
- 2020Memory Transformercited by 76
- 2025YuE: Scaling Open Foundation Models for Long-Form Music Generationcited by 71
- 2023The Song Describer Dataset: a Corpus of Audio Captions for Music-and-Language Evaluationcited by 68
- 2023VampNet: Music Generation via Masked Acoustic Token Modelingcited by 57
- 2026Scaling Text-to-Image Diffusion Transformers with Representation Autoencoderscited by 53
- 2025One-step Diffusion Models with f-Divergence Distribution Matchingcited by 43
- 2023StemGen: A music generation model that listenscited by 32
50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generationcited by 1
- 2026A Quantized Native Runtime for On-Device Semantic Audio Generationcited by 0
- 2026MusicMark: A Robust Generative Watermarking Framework for Music Generationcited by 0
- 2026VoxAudio: Vocalized Audio Synthesis via Multi-Reward Autoregressive Flow Matchingcited by 0
- 2026AURA: Unified Multimodal Framework for Conversational Music Editingcited by 0
- 2026UNITE-AUDIO: Joint Learning of Continuous Tokenization and Latent Flow Matching for Text-to-Audio Generationcited by 0
- 2026UNITE-AUDIO: Joint Learning of Continuous Tokenization and Latent Flow Matching for Text-to-Audio Generation23 Sep 2026
- 2026AURA: Unified Multimodal Framework for Conversational Music Editing13 Sep 2026
- 2026VoxAudio: Vocalized Audio Synthesis via Multi-Reward Autoregressive Flow Matching13 Aug 2026
- 2026MusicMark: A Robust Generative Watermarking Framework for Music Generation13 Jul 2026
- 2026A Quantized Native Runtime for On-Device Semantic Audio Generation9 Jul 2026
- 2026AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generation10 Jun 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2023ConsistencyTTA: Accelerating Diffusion-Based Text-to-Audio Generation with Consistency Distillation
- 2026Stage-adaptive audio diffusion modeling
- 2025Audio Generation Through Score-Based Generative Modeling: Design Principles and Implementation
- 2026SwiftAudio: Data-Efficient Caption-Only Distillation for One-Step Text-to-Audio Diffusion-based Generation
- 2024LiteFocus: Accelerated Diffusion Inference for Long Audio Synthesis
- 2023ArchiSound: Audio Generation with Diffusion
- 2026Fast Text-to-Audio Generation with One-Step Sampling via Energy-Scoring and Auxiliary Contextual Representation Distillation ↗
- 2023EDMSound: Spectrogram Based Diffusion Models for Efficient and High-Quality Audio Synthesis