Inference-time Scaling for Diffusion-based Audio Super-resolution

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jin, Yizhu, Ye, Zhen, Tian, Zeyue, Liu, Haohe, Kong, Qiuqiang, Guo, Yike, Xue, Wei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Jin, Yizhu
Ye, Zhen
Tian, Zeyue
Liu, Haohe
Kong, Qiuqiang
Guo, Yike
Xue, Wei
author_facet Jin, Yizhu
Ye, Zhen
Tian, Zeyue
Liu, Haohe
Kong, Qiuqiang
Guo, Yike
Xue, Wei
contents Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in generative tasks, including audio super-resolution (SR). In many applications like movie post-production and album mastering, substantial computational budgets are available for achieving superior audio quality. However, while existing diffusion approaches typically increase sampling steps to improve quality, the performance remains fundamentally limited by the stochastic nature of the sampling process, leading to high-variance and quality-limited outputs. Here, rather than simply increasing the number of sampling steps, we propose a different paradigm through inference-time scaling for SR, which explores multiple solution trajectories during the sampling process. Different task-specific verifiers are developed, and two search algorithms, including the random search and zero-order search for SR, are introduced. By actively guiding the exploration of the high-dimensional solution space through verifier-algorithm combinations, we enable more robust and higher-quality outputs. Through extensive validation across diverse audio domains (speech, music, sound effects) and frequency ranges, we demonstrate consistent performance gains, achieving improvements of up to 9.70% in aesthetics, 5.88% in speaker similarity, 15.20% in word error rate, and 46.98% in spectral distance for speech SR from 4kHz to 24kHz, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach. Audio samples are available at: https://racerk.github.io/tt-scale-audiosr/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_02391
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inference-time Scaling for Diffusion-based Audio Super-resolution
Jin, Yizhu
Ye, Zhen
Tian, Zeyue
Liu, Haohe
Kong, Qiuqiang
Guo, Yike
Xue, Wei
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in generative tasks, including audio super-resolution (SR). In many applications like movie post-production and album mastering, substantial computational budgets are available for achieving superior audio quality. However, while existing diffusion approaches typically increase sampling steps to improve quality, the performance remains fundamentally limited by the stochastic nature of the sampling process, leading to high-variance and quality-limited outputs. Here, rather than simply increasing the number of sampling steps, we propose a different paradigm through inference-time scaling for SR, which explores multiple solution trajectories during the sampling process. Different task-specific verifiers are developed, and two search algorithms, including the random search and zero-order search for SR, are introduced. By actively guiding the exploration of the high-dimensional solution space through verifier-algorithm combinations, we enable more robust and higher-quality outputs. Through extensive validation across diverse audio domains (speech, music, sound effects) and frequency ranges, we demonstrate consistent performance gains, achieving improvements of up to 9.70% in aesthetics, 5.88% in speaker similarity, 15.20% in word error rate, and 46.98% in spectral distance for speech SR from 4kHz to 24kHz, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach. Audio samples are available at: https://racerk.github.io/tt-scale-audiosr/.
title Inference-time Scaling for Diffusion-based Audio Super-resolution
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02391