WavFlow Generates Audio Directly in Waveform Space (GitHub Repo)

TLDR AI Papers

Summary

WavFlow is a new method from Meta AI that generates synchronized, high-fidelity audio from video and text inputs directly in raw waveform space, bypassing latent compression. It achieves performance on par with latent-based methods on VGGSound and AudioCaps benchmarks.

WavFlow is a flow-matching framework from Meta AI that generates synchronized audio from video and text inputs directly in raw waveform space without relying on latent audio compression.
Original Article
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facebookresearch/WavFlow

Source: https://github.com/facebookresearch/WavFlow

WavFlow: Audio Generation in Waveform Space

Feiyan Zhou1,2 · Luyuan Wang1 · Shoufa Chen1,* · Zhe Wang1 · Zhiheng Liu1 · Yuren Cong1 · Xiaohui Zhang1 · Fanny Yang1 · Belinda Zeng1

1 Meta AI  ·  2 Northeastern University

🌐 Project Page  ·  📄 arXiv  ·  🛠 Training Guide


Overview

WavFlow introduces a paradigm for generating synchronized, high-fidelity audio from video and text inputs directly in the raw waveform space, bypassing latent compression entirely. Through waveform patchifying and amplitude lifting, WavFlow enables stable flow matching on raw audio via direct x-prediction. Evaluation on the VGGSound (VT2A) and AudioCaps (T2A) benchmarks shows that WavFlow delivers performance on par with established latent-based methods, proving that end-to-end waveform generation can match traditional frameworks in acoustic richness, fidelity, and synchronization.

WavFlow overview

Demo

🌳 Forest (natural)

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9828418c-28e8-4c4c-8b93-93d5b8b57358

🐸 Frog (animal)

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/25d1c2ed-7023-4500-bf29-223988cad4a0

🥁 Drum (music)

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3cd0fdbf-a03a-4a15-a69f-99d0c42122b1

🛹 Skateboard (sport)

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/1c572eff-13b6-48aa-89b9-5f13a6924419

See the Project Page for 24+ samples and side-by-side benchmark comparisons.

Method

WavFlow architecture

Installation

git clone https://github.com/facebookresearch/WavFlow.git
cd WavFlow
bash scripts/setup.sh        # creates conda env 'wavflow' and installs everything
conda activate wavflow
Manual setup
conda create -n wavflow python=3.10 -y
conda activate wavflow
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e . --no-deps
conda install -n wavflow -c conda-forge "ffmpeg<7" -y    # for torio video decoding

All required external weights (CLIP, Synchformer, the empty-string CFG embedding) are downloaded or computed automatically on first run and cached under ~/.cache/wavflow/.

Inference

⚠️ Due to organizational policy constraints, we are currently unable to release the production-trained checkpoints. We are working on a foundation checkpoint trained on fully open-source data; in the meantime you can train your own — see the training guide.

Once you have a trained checkpoint, run:

bash scripts/launch/predict.sh [--gpu N] [--config PATH]

The default config is wavflow/configs/infer.yaml. The input CSV (data.csv_path) accepts video, text, or both:

video_path,caption,video_exist,text_exist
/abs/path/sample1.mp4,a whistling rocket explodes,1,1   # video + text
/abs/path/sample2.mp4,birds chirping in a forest,1,1    # video + text
,a whistling rocket explodes,0,1                        # text-only
/abs/path/sample3.mp4,,1,0                              # video-only
Configuration reference

Launcher options

Flag / envDefaultDescription
--gpu N (or GPU=N)0CUDA device index
--config PATH (or CONFIG_PATH=...)wavflow/configs/infer.yamlYAML config to load
WAVFLOW_ENVwavflowconda env name to auto-activate

Any extra positional argument is forwarded to python -m wavflow.infer.

Key fields in infer.yaml

FieldWhat to set
data.csv_paththe input CSV (above)
model.nameone of medium_16k, medium_44k, large_16k, large_44k (must match the trained ckpt)
model.ckpt_patha checkpoint_*.pth (full ckpt) or ema_epoch_*.pth (EMA-only)
model.use_ematrue to load model_ema1 from a full ckpt; false to use the live model weights
inference.duration_sec / target_sample_rateoutput length and SR (must match model arch)
inference.cfg, num_steps, noise_scale, noise_shift, prediction_type, seedsampling hyperparameters
inference.batch_sizerows per ODE batch
inference.trim_to_durationtrim output to duration_sec
output.output_dirwhere wavs are written
output.loudness_norm, loudness_target_lufsoptional pyloudnorm post-processing

CSV semantics

  • video_exist=0 → uses learned empty CLIP/Sync tokens (no video decode)
  • text_exist=0 → uses learned empty CLIP-text token (caption ignored)
  • Optional id column; otherwise the wav file name is derived from Path(video_path).stem, falling back to row_<idx> for text-only rows
  • Captions with commas must be quoted

EMA caveat

The EMA tensor stored as model_ema1 is updated with ema_decay = 0.9999 per step. After only a few hundred / thousand steps it still contains random-init values and produces noise during inference. Set model.use_ema: false (or pass an ema_epoch_*.pth saved after enough steps) when sampling from a short / overfit run.

Training

For feature extraction and training (single-node and multi-node), see TRAINING.md.

Citation

@misc{zhou2026wavflowaudiogenerationwaveform,
      title={WavFlow: Audio Generation in Waveform Space}, 
      author={Feiyan Zhou and Luyuan Wang and Shoufa Chen and Zhe Wang and Zhiheng Liu and Yuren Cong and Xiaohui Zhang and Fanny Yang and Belinda Zeng},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2605.18749},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.SD},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18749}, 
}

Acknowledgements

WavFlow builds on the open-source community. We gratefully acknowledge:

  • MMAudio — multimodal audio generation
  • JiT — Just Image Transformer
  • Synchformer — audio-visual synchronization

License

The majority of WavFlow is licensed under CC-BY-NC 4.0. Portions of the project are vendored from third-party open source projects under their original license terms (MIT, Apache 2.0, CC BY-NC 4.0, and Stability AI Community License). See NOTICE.txt for the full per-component breakdown and license texts.

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