Masked Audio Generation using a Single Non-Autoregressive Transformer
Authors: name: Alon Ziv, name: Itai Gat, name: Gael Le Lan, name: Tal Remez, name: Felix Kreuk, name: Alexandre Défossez, name: Jade Copet, name: Gabriel Synnaeve, name: Yossi Adi

We introduce MAGNeT, a masked generative sequence modeling method that
operates directly over several streams of audio tokens. Unlike prior work,
MAGNeT is comprised of a single-stage, non-autoregressive transformer. During
training, we predict spans of masked tokens obtained from a masking scheduler,
while during inference we gradually construct the output sequence using several
decoding steps. To further enhance the quality of the generated audio, we
introduce a novel rescoring method in which, we leverage an external
pre-trained model to rescore and rank predictions from MAGNeT, which will be
then used for later decoding steps. Lastly, we explore a hybrid version of
MAGNeT, in which we fuse between autoregressive and non-autoregressive models
to generate the first few seconds in an autoregressive manner while the rest of
the sequence is being decoded in parallel. We demonstrate the efficiency of
MAGNeT for the task of text-to-music and text-to-audio generation and conduct
an extensive empirical evaluation, considering both objective metrics and human
studies. The proposed approach is comparable to the evaluated baselines, while
being significantly faster (x7 faster than the autoregressive baseline).
Through ablation studies and analysis, we shed light on the importance of each
of the components comprising MAGNeT, together with pointing to the trade-offs
between autoregressive and non-autoregressive modeling, considering latency,
throughput, and generation quality. Samples are available on our demo page
https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/MAGNeT.