Title: Fast Text-to-Audio Generation with One-Step Sampling via Energy-Scoring and Auxiliary Contextual Representation Distillation
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Energy-scoring, Representation distillation, Low-latency, Autoregressive, Text-to-Audio

Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) models with diffusion heads have recently achieved strong text-to-audio performance, yet their iterative decoding and multi-step sampling process introduce high-latency issues. To address this bottleneck, we propose a one-step sampling framework that combines an energy-distance training objective with representation-level distillation. An energy-scoring head maps Gaussian noise directly to audio latents in one step, eliminating the need for a costly recursive diffusion sampling process, while distillation from a masked autoregressive (MAR) text-to-audio model preserves the strong conditioning learned during diffusion training. On the AudioCaps benchmark, our method consistently outperforms prior one-step baselines on both objective and subjective metrics while substantially narrowing the quality gap to AR diffusion systems with multi-step sampling. Compared to the state-of-the-art AR diffusion system, IMPACT, our approach achieves up to $25$× faster inference with highly competitive audio quality. These results demonstrate that combining energy-distance training with representation-level distillation provides an effective recipe for fast, high-quality text-to-audio synthesis.

TL;DR: AudioDEAR is a fast TTA model that uses one-step sampling by combining an energy-scoring training objective with representation-level distillation to achieve high-quality results with 25x faster inference compared to sota models.