On the Open Prompt Challenge in Conditional Audio Generation

Ernie Chang, Sidd Srinivasan, Mahi Luthra, Pin-Jie Lin, Varun Nagaraja, Forrest N. Iandola, Zechun Liu, Zhaoheng Ni, Changsheng Zhao, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra

Abstract: Text-to-audio generation (TTA) produces audio from a text description, learning from pairs of audio samples and hand-annotated text. However, commercializing audio generation is challenging as user-input prompts are often under-specified when compared to text descriptions used to train TTA models. In this work, we treat TTA models as a "blackbox" and address the user prompt challenge with two key insights: (1) User prompts are generally under-specified, leading to a large alignment gap between user prompts and training prompts. (2) There is a distribution of audio descriptions for which TTA models are better at generating higher quality audio, which we refer to as "audionese". To this end, we rewrite prompts with instruction-tuned models and propose utilizing text-audio alignment as feedback signals via margin ranking learning for audio improvements. On both objective and subjective human evaluations, we observed marked improvements in both text-audio alignment and music audio quality.