Audiobox TTA-RAG: Improving Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Text-To-Audio with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract: This work focuses on improving Text-To-Audio (TTA) generation on zero-shot and few-shot settings (i.e. generating unseen or uncommon audio events). Inspired by the success of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in LLMs, we propose Audiobox TTA-RAG, a novel retrieval-augmented TTA approach based on Audiobox, a flow-matching audio generation model. Unlike the vanilla Audiobox TTA solution that generates audio conditioned on text only, we extend the TTA process by augmenting the conditioning input with both text and retrieved audio samples. Our retrieval method does not require the external database to have labeled audio, offering more practical use cases. We show that the proposed model can effectively leverage the retrieved audio samples and significantly improve zero-shot and few-shot TTA performance, with large margins on multiple evaluation metrics, while maintaining the ability to generate semantically aligned audio for the in-domain setting.