# SCAPES: Semantically Conditioned Autoregressive Prior for Environmental Sounds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04634/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

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- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [AudioLDM: Text-to-Audio Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12503/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
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- [CoDiCodec: Unifying Continuous and Discrete Compressed Representations of Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09836/) (2025)
- [Woosh: A Sound Effects Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01929/) (2026)
- [A Statistics-Driven Differentiable Approach for Sound Texture Synthesis and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04073/) (2025)
- [MusGU+: Toward a Musician-Centered Evaluation Framework and Discovery Tool for Generative Music AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30940/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As generative audio models grow in complexity, the computational and ecological costs of synthesizing everyday sounds have become increasingly prohibitive, often requiring industrial-scale resources and massive datasets. In this paper, we present SCAPES: a Semantically Conditioned Autoregressive Prior for Environmental Sounds. SCAPES is a lightweight, resource-efficient generative model designed to synthesize high-fidelity environmental textures through high-level semantic control. By operating on the continuous latent manifold of a neural audio codec, our approach bypasses the rigid structural constraints inherent to discrete tokenization. We propose a segmentation strategy that decomposes audio into overlapping segments, enabling a Continuous Normalizing Flow (CNF) to model the evolution of latent trajectories using Flow Matching. Our experiments demonstrate that a 36-million parameter instance of SCAPES can be trained on limited, uncurated datasets using a single consumer-grade GPU. Notably, convergence is achieved after training for approximately twice the source audio duration, yielding high-fidelity outputs with robust long-term stability and semantic consistency. Furthermore, we showcase the model's capacity for smooth semantic interpolation, providing a flexible and accessible tool for open research and creative sound design. Code, pretrained weights, audio examples, and an interactive demo are publicly available on our project page https://cordutie.github.io/projects/scapes.html