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.
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).