# Stable Audio 3

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17991 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17991/

## 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.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Audio, speech and music](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/audio-speech-and-music/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [Improved Distribution Matching Distillation for Fast Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14867/) (2024)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07804/) (2021)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02279/) (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)
- [Simple diffusion: End-to-end diffusion for high resolution images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11093/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Distillation in Iterative Generative Models for Improved Sampling Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02388/) (2021)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [PixArt-Sigma: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04692/) (2024)
- [Hunyuan-DiT: A Powerful Multi-Resolution Diffusion Transformer with Fine-Grained Chinese Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08748/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [AudioX-Turbo: A Unified Framework for Efficient Anything-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12555/) (2026)
- [A Quantized Native Runtime for On-Device Semantic Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08526/) (2026)
- [MusicMark: A Robust Generative Watermarking Framework for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11117/) (2026)
- [VoxAudio: Vocalized Audio Synthesis via Multi-Reward Autoregressive Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12951/) (2026)
- [AURA: Unified Multimodal Framework for Conversational Music Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14344/) (2026)
- [UNITE-AUDIO: Joint Learning of Continuous Tokenization and Latent Flow Matching for Text-to-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28206/) (2026)

## 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.