Enhance audio generation controllability through representation
  similarity regularization
Authors: name: Yangyang Shi, name: Gael Le Lan, name: Varun Nagaraja, name: Zhaoheng Ni, name: Xinhao Mei, name: Ernie Chang, name: Forrest Iandola, name: Yang Liu, name: Vikas Chandra

This paper presents an innovative approach to enhance control over audio
generation by emphasizing the alignment between audio and text representations
during model training. In the context of language model-based audio generation,
the model leverages input from both textual and audio token representations to
predict subsequent audio tokens. However, the current configuration lacks
explicit regularization to ensure the alignment between the chosen text
representation and the language model's predictions. Our proposal involves the
incorporation of audio and text representation regularization, particularly
during the classifier-free guidance (CFG) phase, where the text condition is
excluded from cross attention during language model training. The aim of this
proposed representation regularization is to minimize discrepancies in audio
and text similarity compared to other samples within the same training batch.
Experimental results on both music and audio generation tasks demonstrate that
our proposed methods lead to improvements in objective metrics for both audio
and music generation, as well as an enhancement in the human perception for
audio generation.