# Decoupled Latent Flow Matching for Few-Step Joint Vocal-Accompaniment Separation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30913 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30913/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio, speech and music, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 22 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13447/) (2025)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/) (2019)
- [MERT: Acoustic Music Understanding Model with Large-Scale Self-supervised Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00107/) (2023)
- [Improved Mean Flows: On the Challenges of Fastforward Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02012/) (2025)
- [DDT: Decoupled Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05741/) (2025)
- [Hybrid Spectrogram and Waveform Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03600/) (2021)
- [ViSQOL v3: An Open Source Production Ready Objective Speech and Audio Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09584/) (2020)
- [The 2018 Signal Separation Evaluation Campaign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06267/) (2018)
- [Flow2GAN: Hybrid Flow Matching and GAN with Multi-Resolution Network for Few-step High-Fidelity Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23278/) (2025)
- [Towards Reliable Objective Evaluation Metrics for Generative Singing Voice Separation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11427/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative modeling provides a flexible way to model mixture-conditioned source distributions, but iterative diffusion and flow matching models are costly for long music signals. This paper studies joint vocal-accompaniment separation through latent flow matching, where a pretrained variational autoencoder (VAE) maps mixtures and sources into a compact latent space and a flow matching model generates vocal and accompaniment latents jointly. The proposed framework decouples semantic separation from acoustic velocity prediction through a Separation Encoder and a Velocity Decoder. To reduce sampling cost, we further apply latent adversarial post-training inspired by Flow2GAN for few-step generation. Experiments show that latent adversarial refinement can improve perceptual and separation metrics under a reduced sampling budget.