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KVAE-Audio

KVAE-Audio is a continuous, full-band (48 kHz) audio autoencoder. It compresses raw waveforms into compact continuous latents and reconstructs them with high fidelity across speech, music, and general sound. The model is designed not only for faithful reconstruction, but as a latent space for generative models — in our internal text-to-audio pipeline, swapping the autoencoder for KVAE-Audio improves generation quality under a fixed generator.

KVAE-Audio is now available in Hugging Face Diffusers 🤗🧨 as AutoencoderKLKVAEAudio.

Evaluation results

Evaluation of latent space qualities for generation

Generative quality is established under a fixed generator — same DiT architecture, training data, and number of steps — varying only the autoencoder. We report objective generation metrics and blind human side-by-side below.

AudioCaps test set

Model	# Params	Latent dim	CLAP↑	CE↑	PQ↑	FAD (PANNs)↓	FAD (PASST)↓	FAD (VGGIsh)↓
MMAudio 44.1kHz	427.6M	40	0,336	3,909	6,192	17,873	195,910	1,364
DACVAE MovieGen	107.7M	128	0,313	3,772	6,167	20,558	234,312	1,700
SAME-L	852.1M	256	0,322	3,588	5,756	18,446	240,635	1,325
KVAE-Audio	166.9M	64	0,344	3,982	6,242	15,381	193,760	1,210

Song Describer

Model	# Params	Latent dim	CLAP↑	CE↑	PQ↑	FAD (PANNs)↓	FAD (PASST)↓	FAD (VGGIsh)↓
MMAudio 44.1kHz	427.6M	40	0,356	7,136	7,707	5,412	158,599	0,356
DACVAE MovieGen	107.7M	128	0,312	6,953	7,538	10,194	214,009	1,046
SAME-L	852.1M	256	0,345	7,076	7,465	8,442	250,668	0,987
KVAE-Audio	166.9M	64	0,339	7,216	7,929	7,971	189,427	0,599

LibriSpeech test-clean

Model	# Params	Latent dim	CLAP↑	CE↑	PQ↑	FAD (PANNs)↓	FAD (PASST)↓	FAD (VGGIsh)↓	WER↓	CER↓
MMAudio 44.1kHz	427.6M	40	0,368	5,704	6,629	8,305	105,931	2,001	0,257	0,593
DACVAE MovieGen	107.7M	128	0,413	5,482	7,052	5,008	210,478	1,501	0,911	1,048
SAME-L	852.1M	256	0,379	4,617	5,024	10,257	301,508	2,721	0,349	0,629
KVAE-Audio	166.9M	64	0,389	5,906	6,940	4,677	185,609	2,138	0,244	0,576

Reconstructions

Reconstruction is evaluated on open datasets across domains (the released weights directly substantiate these numbers). Baselines: MMAudio 44.1 kHz VAE, DACVAE from MovieGen Audio, SAME-L (Stable Audio 3 VAE).

AudioSet eval

Model	# Params	Latent dim	MEL↓	STFT↓	Waveform↓	SI-SDR↑	SDR↑	SNR↑
MMAudio 44.1kHz	427.6M	40	0,636	1,938	0,106	-32,080	-2,682	-2,686
DACVAE MovieGen	107.7M	128	0,669	2,275	0,029	8,384	9,421	9,416
SAME-L	852.1M	256	0,986	2,726	0,027	9,586	10,347	10,339
KVAE-Audio	166.9M	64	0,537	1,770	0,027	9,065	9,920	9,933

MUSDB18-HQ

Model	# Params	Latent dim	MEL↓	STFT↓	Waveform↓	SI-SDR↑	SDR↑	SNR↑
MMAudio 44.1kHz	427.6M	40	0,681	1,865	0,114	-40,204	-3,274	-3,273
DACVAE MovieGen	107.7M	128	0,519	1,762	0,024	9,688	10,046	10,047
SAME-L	852.1M	256	0,668	1,786	0,023	10,278	10,648	10,648
KVAE-Audio	166.9M	64	0,516	1,725	0,022	10,390	10,675	10,677

EARS

Model	# Params	Latent dim	MEL↓	STFT↓	Waveform↓	SI-SDR↑	SDR↑	SNR↑	PESQ↑
MMAudio 44.1kHz	427.6M	40	0,616	1,395	0,030	-29,947	-2,728	-2,697	2,424
DACVAE MovieGen	107.7M	128	0,453	1,310	0,006	10,264	10,680	10,681	4,246
SAME-L	852.1M	256	0,774	1,575	0,007	9,939	10,374	10,376	2,982
KVAE-Audio	166.9M	64	0,463	1,314	0,006	9,952	10,377	10,384	4,266

kandinskylab/KVAE-Audio