arXiv · 2605.18613
SAME: A Semantically-Aligned Music Autoencoder
Abstract
Latent representations are at the heart of the majority of modern generative models. In the audio domain they are typically produced by a neural-audio-codec autoencoder. In this work we introduce SAME (Semantically-Aligned Music autoEncoder), an autoencoder for stereo music and general audio that reaches a 4096$\times$ temporal compression ratio while maintaining reconstruction quality and downstream generative performance. We achieve this by combining a tranformer-based backbone with set of semantic regularisation approaches, phase-aware reconstruction losses and improved discriminator designs. The architecture delivers substantial computational cost benefits, through both its high compression ratio and its reliance on well-optimised transformer primitives. Two variants (a large SAME-L and a CPU-deployable SAME-S) are released in open-weights form.
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Julian D. Parker, Zach Evans, CJ Carr, Zachary Zukowski, Josiah Taylor, Matthew Rice, Jordi Pons. 2026-05-18. SAME: A Semantically-Aligned Music Autoencoder. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18613
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