Publications

Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)

Publication date: April 24, 2025

Zachary Novack, Ge Zhu, Jonah Casebeer, Julian McAuley, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Nicholas J. Bryan

Spotlight

Despite advances in diffusion-based text-to-music (TTM) methods, efficient, high-quality generation remains a challenge. We introduce Presto!, an approach to inference acceleration for score-based diffusion transformers via reducing both sampling steps and cost per step. To reduce steps, we develop a new score-based distribution matching distillation (DMD) method for the EDM-family of diffusion models, the first GAN-based distillation method for TTM. To reduce the cost per step, we develop a simple, but powerful improvement to a recent layer distillation method that improves learning via preserving hidden state variance. Finally, we combine our improved step and layer distillation methods together for a dual-faceted approach. We evaluate our step and layer distillation methods independently and show each yield best-in-class performance. Furthermore, we find our combined distillation method can generate high-quality outputs with improved diversity accelerating our base model by 10-18x (32 second output in 230ms, 15x faster than the comparable SOTA model) -- the fastest high-quality TTM model to our knowledge.

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Research Areas:  Adobe Research iconAI & Machine Learning Adobe Research iconAudio