Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Audio Generation
Authors: name: Yi Yuan, name: Haohe Liu, name: Xubo Liu, name: Qiushi Huang, name: Mark D. Plumbley, name: Wenwu Wang

Despite recent progress in text-to-audio (TTA) generation, we show that the
state-of-the-art models, such as AudioLDM, trained on datasets with an
imbalanced class distribution, such as AudioCaps, are biased in their
generation performance. Specifically, they excel in generating common audio
classes while underperforming in the rare ones, thus degrading the overall
generation performance. We refer to this problem as long-tailed text-to-audio
generation. To address this issue, we propose a simple retrieval-augmented
approach for TTA models. Specifically, given an input text prompt, we first
leverage a Contrastive Language Audio Pretraining (CLAP) model to retrieve
relevant text-audio pairs. The features of the retrieved audio-text data are
then used as additional conditions to guide the learning of TTA models. We
enhance AudioLDM with our proposed approach and denote the resulting augmented
system as Re-AudioLDM. On the AudioCaps dataset, Re-AudioLDM achieves a
state-of-the-art Frechet Audio Distance (FAD) of 1.37, outperforming the
existing approaches by a large margin. Furthermore, we show that Re-AudioLDM
can generate realistic audio for complex scenes, rare audio classes, and even
unseen audio types, indicating its potential in TTA tasks.