Resonate: Reinforcing Text-to-Audio Generation via Online Feedback from Large Audio Language Models

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an effective paradigm for enhancing LLMs and visual generative models. However, its application in text-to-audio (TTA) generation remains largely under-explored. Prior work typically employs offline methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and leverages Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) models as reward functions. In this study, we investigate the integration of online Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) into TTA generation. We adapt the algorithm for Flow Matching-based audio models and demonstrate that online RL significantly outperforms its offline counterparts. Furthermore, we incorporate rewards derived from Large Audio LLMs (LALMs), which can provide fine-grained scoring signals that are better aligned with human perception. With only 470M parameters, our final model, \textbf{Resonate}, establishes a new SOTA on TTA-Bench in terms of both audio quality and semantic alignment.