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Dec 3

AUDIT: Audio Editing by Following Instructions with Latent Diffusion Models

Audio editing is applicable for various purposes, such as adding background sound effects, replacing a musical instrument, and repairing damaged audio. Recently, some diffusion-based methods achieved zero-shot audio editing by using a diffusion and denoising process conditioned on the text description of the output audio. However, these methods still have some problems: 1) they have not been trained on editing tasks and cannot ensure good editing effects; 2) they can erroneously modify audio segments that do not require editing; 3) they need a complete description of the output audio, which is not always available or necessary in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose AUDIT, an instruction-guided audio editing model based on latent diffusion models. Specifically, AUDIT has three main design features: 1) we construct triplet training data (instruction, input audio, output audio) for different audio editing tasks and train a diffusion model using instruction and input (to be edited) audio as conditions and generating output (edited) audio; 2) it can automatically learn to only modify segments that need to be edited by comparing the difference between the input and output audio; 3) it only needs edit instructions instead of full target audio descriptions as text input. AUDIT achieves state-of-the-art results in both objective and subjective metrics for several audio editing tasks (e.g., adding, dropping, replacement, inpainting, super-resolution). Demo samples are available at https://audit-demo.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 3, 2023 1

ThinkSound: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models for Audio Generation and Editing

While end-to-end video-to-audio generation has greatly improved, producing high-fidelity audio that authentically captures the nuances of visual content remains challenging. Like professionals in the creative industries, such generation requires sophisticated reasoning about items such as visual dynamics, acoustic environments, and temporal relationships. We present ThinkSound, a novel framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enable stepwise, interactive audio generation and editing for videos. Our approach decomposes the process into three complementary stages: foundational foley generation that creates semantically coherent soundscapes, interactive object-centric refinement through precise user interactions, and targeted editing guided by natural language instructions. At each stage, a multimodal large language model generates contextually aligned CoT reasoning that guides a unified audio foundation model. Furthermore, we introduce AudioCoT, a comprehensive dataset with structured reasoning annotations that establishes connections between visual content, textual descriptions, and sound synthesis. Experiments demonstrate that ThinkSound achieves state-of-the-art performance in video-to-audio generation across both audio metrics and CoT metrics and excels in out-of-distribution Movie Gen Audio benchmark. The demo page is available at https://ThinkSound-Project.github.io.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 26 2

RASA: Replace Anyone, Say Anything -- A Training-Free Framework for Audio-Driven and Universal Portrait Video Editing

Portrait video editing focuses on modifying specific attributes of portrait videos, guided by audio or video streams. Previous methods typically either concentrate on lip-region reenactment or require training specialized models to extract keypoints for motion transfer to a new identity. In this paper, we introduce a training-free universal portrait video editing framework that provides a versatile and adaptable editing strategy. This framework supports portrait appearance editing conditioned on the changed first reference frame, as well as lip editing conditioned on varied speech, or a combination of both. It is based on a Unified Animation Control (UAC) mechanism with source inversion latents to edit the entire portrait, including visual-driven shape control, audio-driven speaking control, and inter-frame temporal control. Furthermore, our method can be adapted to different scenarios by adjusting the initial reference frame, enabling detailed editing of portrait videos with specific head rotations and facial expressions. This comprehensive approach ensures a holistic and flexible solution for portrait video editing. The experimental results show that our model can achieve more accurate and synchronized lip movements for the lip editing task, as well as more flexible motion transfer for the appearance editing task. Demo is available at https://alice01010101.github.io/RASA/.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 14

Learning to Highlight Audio by Watching Movies

Recent years have seen a significant increase in video content creation and consumption. Crafting engaging content requires the careful curation of both visual and audio elements. While visual cue curation, through techniques like optimal viewpoint selection or post-editing, has been central to media production, its natural counterpart, audio, has not undergone equivalent advancements. This often results in a disconnect between visual and acoustic saliency. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task: visually-guided acoustic highlighting, which aims to transform audio to deliver appropriate highlighting effects guided by the accompanying video, ultimately creating a more harmonious audio-visual experience. We propose a flexible, transformer-based multimodal framework to solve this task. To train our model, we also introduce a new dataset -- the muddy mix dataset, leveraging the meticulous audio and video crafting found in movies, which provides a form of free supervision. We develop a pseudo-data generation process to simulate poorly mixed audio, mimicking real-world scenarios through a three-step process -- separation, adjustment, and remixing. Our approach consistently outperforms several baselines in both quantitative and subjective evaluation. We also systematically study the impact of different types of contextual guidance and difficulty levels of the dataset. Our project page is here: https://wikichao.github.io/VisAH/.

  • 8 authors
·
May 17 2

Vidi: Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding and Editing

Humans naturally share information with those they are connected to, and video has become one of the dominant mediums for communication and expression on the Internet. To support the creation of high-quality large-scale video content, a modern pipeline requires a comprehensive understanding of both the raw input materials (e.g., the unedited footage captured by cameras) and the editing components (e.g., visual effects). In video editing scenarios, models must process multiple modalities (e.g., vision, audio, text) with strong background knowledge and handle flexible input lengths (e.g., hour-long raw videos), which poses significant challenges for traditional models. In this report, we introduce Vidi, a family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for a wide range of video understand editing scenarios. The first release focuses on temporal retrieval, i.e., identifying the time ranges within the input videos corresponding to a given text query, which plays a critical role in intelligent editing. The model is capable of processing hour-long videos with strong temporal understanding capability, e.g., retrieve time ranges for certain queries. To support a comprehensive evaluation in real-world scenarios, we also present the VUE-TR benchmark, which introduces five key advancements. 1) Video duration: significantly longer than existing temporal retrival datasets, 2) Audio support: includes audio-based queries, 3) Query format: diverse query lengths/formats, 4) Annotation quality: ground-truth time ranges are manually annotated. 5) Evaluation metric: a refined IoU metric to support evaluation over multiple time ranges. Remarkably, Vidi significantly outperforms leading proprietary models, e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini, on the temporal retrieval task, indicating its superiority in video editing scenarios.

InstructAny2Pix: Flexible Visual Editing via Multimodal Instruction Following

The ability to provide fine-grained control for generating and editing visual imagery has profound implications for computer vision and its applications. Previous works have explored extending controllability in two directions: instruction tuning with text-based prompts and multi-modal conditioning. However, these works make one or more unnatural assumptions on the number and/or type of modality inputs used to express controllability. We propose InstructAny2Pix, a flexible multi-modal instruction-following system that enables users to edit an input image using instructions involving audio, images, and text. InstructAny2Pix consists of three building blocks that facilitate this capability: a multi-modal encoder that encodes different modalities such as images and audio into a unified latent space, a diffusion model that learns to decode representations in this latent space into images, and a multi-modal LLM that can understand instructions involving multiple images and audio pieces and generate a conditional embedding of the desired output, which can be used by the diffusion decoder. Additionally, to facilitate training efficiency and improve generation quality, we include an additional refinement prior module that enhances the visual quality of LLM outputs. These designs are critical to the performance of our system. We demonstrate that our system can perform a series of novel instruction-guided editing tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/jacklishufan/InstructAny2Pix.git

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023

Ming-UniAudio: Speech LLM for Joint Understanding, Generation and Editing with Unified Representation

Existing speech models suffer from competing requirements on token representations by understanding and generation tasks. This discrepancy in representation prevents speech language models from performing instruction-based free-form editing. To solve this challenge, we introduce a novel framework that unifies speech understanding, generation, and editing. The core of our unified model is a unified continuous speech tokenizer MingTok-Audio, the first continuous tokenizer to effectively integrate semantic and acoustic features, which makes it suitable for both understanding and generation tasks. Based on this unified continuous audio tokenizer, we developed the speech language model Ming-UniAudio, which achieved a balance between generation and understanding capabilities. Ming-UniAudio sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) records on 8 out of 12 metrics on the ContextASR benchmark. Notably, for Chinese voice cloning, it achieves a highly competitive Seed-TTS-WER of 0.95. Leveraging this foundational model, we further trained a dedicated speech editing model Ming-UniAudio-Edit, the first speech language model that enables universal, free-form speech editing guided solely by natural language instructions, handling both semantic and acoustic modifications without timestamp condition. To rigorously assess the editing capability and establish a foundation for future research, we introduce Ming-Freeform-Audio-Edit, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for instruction-based free-form speech editing, featuring diverse scenarios and evaluation dimensions spanning semantic correctness, acoustic quality, and instruction alignment. We open-sourced the continuous audio tokenizer, the unified foundational model, and the free-form instruction-based editing model to facilitate the development of unified audio understanding, generation, and manipulation.

inclusionAI inclusionAI
·
Oct 26

Instruct-MusicGen: Unlocking Text-to-Music Editing for Music Language Models via Instruction Tuning

Recent advances in text-to-music editing, which employ text queries to modify music (e.g.\ by changing its style or adjusting instrumental components), present unique challenges and opportunities for AI-assisted music creation. Previous approaches in this domain have been constrained by the necessity to train specific editing models from scratch, which is both resource-intensive and inefficient; other research uses large language models to predict edited music, resulting in imprecise audio reconstruction. To Combine the strengths and address these limitations, we introduce Instruct-MusicGen, a novel approach that finetunes a pretrained MusicGen model to efficiently follow editing instructions such as adding, removing, or separating stems. Our approach involves a modification of the original MusicGen architecture by incorporating a text fusion module and an audio fusion module, which allow the model to process instruction texts and audio inputs concurrently and yield the desired edited music. Remarkably, Instruct-MusicGen only introduces 8% new parameters to the original MusicGen model and only trains for 5K steps, yet it achieves superior performance across all tasks compared to existing baselines, and demonstrates performance comparable to the models trained for specific tasks. This advancement not only enhances the efficiency of text-to-music editing but also broadens the applicability of music language models in dynamic music production environments.

  • 10 authors
·
May 28, 2024 3

PC-Talk: Precise Facial Animation Control for Audio-Driven Talking Face Generation

Recent advancements in audio-driven talking face generation have made great progress in lip synchronization. However, current methods often lack sufficient control over facial animation such as speaking style and emotional expression, resulting in uniform outputs. In this paper, we focus on improving two key factors: lip-audio alignment and emotion control, to enhance the diversity and user-friendliness of talking videos. Lip-audio alignment control focuses on elements like speaking style and the scale of lip movements, whereas emotion control is centered on generating realistic emotional expressions, allowing for modifications in multiple attributes such as intensity. To achieve precise control of facial animation, we propose a novel framework, PC-Talk, which enables lip-audio alignment and emotion control through implicit keypoint deformations. First, our lip-audio alignment control module facilitates precise editing of speaking styles at the word level and adjusts lip movement scales to simulate varying vocal loudness levels, maintaining lip synchronization with the audio. Second, our emotion control module generates vivid emotional facial features with pure emotional deformation. This module also enables the fine modification of intensity and the combination of multiple emotions across different facial regions. Our method demonstrates outstanding control capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both HDTF and MEAD datasets in extensive experiments.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 18

Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts

Audio is an essential part of our life, but creating it often requires expertise and is time-consuming. Research communities have made great progress over the past year advancing the performance of large scale audio generative models for a single modality (speech, sound, or music) through adopting more powerful generative models and scaling data. However, these models lack controllability in several aspects: speech generation models cannot synthesize novel styles based on text description and are limited on domain coverage such as outdoor environments; sound generation models only provide coarse-grained control based on descriptions like "a person speaking" and would only generate mumbling human voices. This paper presents Audiobox, a unified model based on flow-matching that is capable of generating various audio modalities. We design description-based and example-based prompting to enhance controllability and unify speech and sound generation paradigms. We allow transcript, vocal, and other audio styles to be controlled independently when generating speech. To improve model generalization with limited labels, we adapt a self-supervised infilling objective to pre-train on large quantities of unlabeled audio. Audiobox sets new benchmarks on speech and sound generation (0.745 similarity on Librispeech for zero-shot TTS; 0.77 FAD on AudioCaps for text-to-sound) and unlocks new methods for generating audio with novel vocal and acoustic styles. We further integrate Bespoke Solvers, which speeds up generation by over 25 times compared to the default ODE solver for flow-matching, without loss of performance on several tasks. Our demo is available at https://audiobox.metademolab.com/

  • 24 authors
·
Dec 25, 2023 4

Sparks of Large Audio Models: A Survey and Outlook

This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements and challenges in applying large language models to the field of audio signal processing. Audio processing, with its diverse signal representations and a wide range of sources--from human voices to musical instruments and environmental sounds--poses challenges distinct from those found in traditional Natural Language Processing scenarios. Nevertheless, Large Audio Models, epitomized by transformer-based architectures, have shown marked efficacy in this sphere. By leveraging massive amount of data, these models have demonstrated prowess in a variety of audio tasks, spanning from Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech to Music Generation, among others. Notably, recently these Foundational Audio Models, like SeamlessM4T, have started showing abilities to act as universal translators, supporting multiple speech tasks for up to 100 languages without any reliance on separate task-specific systems. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art methodologies regarding Foundational Large Audio Models, their performance benchmarks, and their applicability to real-world scenarios. We also highlight current limitations and provide insights into potential future research directions in the realm of Large Audio Models with the intent to spark further discussion, thereby fostering innovation in the next generation of audio-processing systems. Furthermore, to cope with the rapid development in this area, we will consistently update the relevant repository with relevant recent articles and their open-source implementations at https://github.com/EmulationAI/awesome-large-audio-models.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 24, 2023

Exploring Quality and Generalizability in Parameterized Neural Audio Effects

Deep neural networks have shown promise for music audio signal processing applications, often surpassing prior approaches, particularly as end-to-end models in the waveform domain. Yet results to date have tended to be constrained by low sample rates, noise, narrow domains of signal types, and/or lack of parameterized controls (i.e. "knobs"), making their suitability for professional audio engineering workflows still lacking. This work expands on prior research published on modeling nonlinear time-dependent signal processing effects associated with music production by means of a deep neural network, one which includes the ability to emulate the parameterized settings you would see on an analog piece of equipment, with the goal of eventually producing commercially viable, high quality audio, i.e. 44.1 kHz sampling rate at 16-bit resolution. The results in this paper highlight progress in modeling these effects through architecture and optimization changes, towards increasing computational efficiency, lowering signal-to-noise ratio, and extending to a larger variety of nonlinear audio effects. Toward these ends, the strategies employed involved a three-pronged approach: model speed, model accuracy, and model generalizability. Most of the presented methods provide marginal or no increase in output accuracy over the original model, with the exception of dataset manipulation. We found that limiting the audio content of the dataset, for example using datasets of just a single instrument, provided a significant improvement in model accuracy over models trained on more general datasets.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 9, 2020

WavJourney: Compositional Audio Creation with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in integrating diverse expert models to tackle intricate language and vision tasks. Despite their significance in advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), their potential in intelligent audio content creation remains unexplored. In this work, we tackle the problem of creating audio content with storylines encompassing speech, music, and sound effects, guided by text instructions. We present WavJourney, a system that leverages LLMs to connect various audio models for audio content generation. Given a text description of an auditory scene, WavJourney first prompts LLMs to generate a structured script dedicated to audio storytelling. The audio script incorporates diverse audio elements, organized based on their spatio-temporal relationships. As a conceptual representation of audio, the audio script provides an interactive and interpretable rationale for human engagement. Afterward, the audio script is fed into a script compiler, converting it into a computer program. Each line of the program calls a task-specific audio generation model or computational operation function (e.g., concatenate, mix). The computer program is then executed to obtain an explainable solution for audio generation. We demonstrate the practicality of WavJourney across diverse real-world scenarios, including science fiction, education, and radio play. The explainable and interactive design of WavJourney fosters human-machine co-creation in multi-round dialogues, enhancing creative control and adaptability in audio production. WavJourney audiolizes the human imagination, opening up new avenues for creativity in multimedia content creation.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 26, 2023 1

SonicMaster: Towards Controllable All-in-One Music Restoration and Mastering

Music recordings often suffer from audio quality issues such as excessive reverberation, distortion, clipping, tonal imbalances, and a narrowed stereo image, especially when created in non-professional settings without specialized equipment or expertise. These problems are typically corrected using separate specialized tools and manual adjustments. In this paper, we introduce SonicMaster, the first unified generative model for music restoration and mastering that addresses a broad spectrum of audio artifacts with text-based control. SonicMaster is conditioned on natural language instructions to apply targeted enhancements, or can operate in an automatic mode for general restoration. To train this model, we construct the SonicMaster dataset, a large dataset of paired degraded and high-quality tracks by simulating common degradation types with nineteen degradation functions belonging to five enhancements groups: equalization, dynamics, reverb, amplitude, and stereo. Our approach leverages a flow-matching generative training paradigm to learn an audio transformation that maps degraded inputs to their cleaned, mastered versions guided by text prompts. Objective audio quality metrics demonstrate that SonicMaster significantly improves sound quality across all artifact categories. Furthermore, subjective listening tests confirm that listeners prefer SonicMaster's enhanced outputs over the original degraded audio, highlighting the effectiveness of our unified approach.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 5 3

MuseCoco: Generating Symbolic Music from Text

Generating music from text descriptions is a user-friendly mode since the text is a relatively easy interface for user engagement. While some approaches utilize texts to control music audio generation, editing musical elements in generated audio is challenging for users. In contrast, symbolic music offers ease of editing, making it more accessible for users to manipulate specific musical elements. In this paper, we propose MuseCoco, which generates symbolic music from text descriptions with musical attributes as the bridge to break down the task into text-to-attribute understanding and attribute-to-music generation stages. MuseCoCo stands for Music Composition Copilot that empowers musicians to generate music directly from given text descriptions, offering a significant improvement in efficiency compared to creating music entirely from scratch. The system has two main advantages: Firstly, it is data efficient. In the attribute-to-music generation stage, the attributes can be directly extracted from music sequences, making the model training self-supervised. In the text-to-attribute understanding stage, the text is synthesized and refined by ChatGPT based on the defined attribute templates. Secondly, the system can achieve precise control with specific attributes in text descriptions and offers multiple control options through attribute-conditioned or text-conditioned approaches. MuseCoco outperforms baseline systems in terms of musicality, controllability, and overall score by at least 1.27, 1.08, and 1.32 respectively. Besides, there is a notable enhancement of about 20% in objective control accuracy. In addition, we have developed a robust large-scale model with 1.2 billion parameters, showcasing exceptional controllability and musicality.

  • 7 authors
·
May 31, 2023

SonicVisionLM: Playing Sound with Vision Language Models

There has been a growing interest in the task of generating sound for silent videos, primarily because of its practicality in streamlining video post-production. However, existing methods for video-sound generation attempt to directly create sound from visual representations, which can be challenging due to the difficulty of aligning visual representations with audio representations. In this paper, we present SonicVisionLM, a novel framework aimed at generating a wide range of sound effects by leveraging vision-language models(VLMs). Instead of generating audio directly from video, we use the capabilities of powerful VLMs. When provided with a silent video, our approach first identifies events within the video using a VLM to suggest possible sounds that match the video content. This shift in approach transforms the challenging task of aligning image and audio into more well-studied sub-problems of aligning image-to-text and text-to-audio through the popular diffusion models. To improve the quality of audio recommendations with LLMs, we have collected an extensive dataset that maps text descriptions to specific sound effects and developed a time-controlled audio adapter. Our approach surpasses current state-of-the-art methods for converting video to audio, enhancing synchronization with the visuals, and improving alignment between audio and video components. Project page: https://yusiissy.github.io/SonicVisionLM.github.io/

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 9, 2024

AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation

We tackle the problem of generating audio samples conditioned on descriptive text captions. In this work, we propose AaudioGen, an auto-regressive generative model that generates audio samples conditioned on text inputs. AudioGen operates on a learnt discrete audio representation. The task of text-to-audio generation poses multiple challenges. Due to the way audio travels through a medium, differentiating ``objects'' can be a difficult task (e.g., separating multiple people simultaneously speaking). This is further complicated by real-world recording conditions (e.g., background noise, reverberation, etc.). Scarce text annotations impose another constraint, limiting the ability to scale models. Finally, modeling high-fidelity audio requires encoding audio at high sampling rate, leading to extremely long sequences. To alleviate the aforementioned challenges we propose an augmentation technique that mixes different audio samples, driving the model to internally learn to separate multiple sources. We curated 10 datasets containing different types of audio and text annotations to handle the scarcity of text-audio data points. For faster inference, we explore the use of multi-stream modeling, allowing the use of shorter sequences while maintaining a similar bitrate and perceptual quality. We apply classifier-free guidance to improve adherence to text. Comparing to the evaluated baselines, AudioGen outperforms over both objective and subjective metrics. Finally, we explore the ability of the proposed method to generate audio continuation conditionally and unconditionally. Samples: https://felixkreuk.github.io/audiogen

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer for Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Audio language models have recently emerged as a promising approach for various audio generation tasks, relying on audio tokenizers to encode waveforms into sequences of discrete symbols. Audio tokenization often poses a necessary compromise between code bitrate and reconstruction accuracy. When dealing with low-bitrate audio codes, language models are constrained to process only a subset of the information embedded in the audio, which in turn restricts their generative capabilities. To circumvent these issues, we propose encoding audio as vector sequences in continuous space mathbb R^d and autoregressively generating these sequences using a decoder-only diffusion transformer (ARDiT). Our findings indicate that ARDiT excels in zero-shot text-to-speech and exhibits performance that compares to or even surpasses that of state-of-the-art models. High-bitrate continuous speech representation enables almost flawless reconstruction, allowing our model to achieve nearly perfect speech editing. Our experiments reveal that employing Integral Kullback-Leibler (IKL) divergence for distillation at each autoregressive step significantly boosts the perceived quality of the samples. Simultaneously, it condenses the iterative sampling process of the diffusion model into a single step. Furthermore, ARDiT can be trained to predict several continuous vectors in one step, significantly reducing latency during sampling. Impressively, one of our models can generate 170 ms of 24 kHz speech per evaluation step with minimal degradation in performance. Audio samples are available at http://ardit-tts.github.io/ .

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 8, 2024

Auto-Regressive vs Flow-Matching: a Comparative Study of Modeling Paradigms for Text-to-Music Generation

Recent progress in text-to-music generation has enabled models to synthesize high-quality musical segments, full compositions, and even respond to fine-grained control signals, e.g. chord progressions. State-of-the-art (SOTA) systems differ significantly across many dimensions, such as training datasets, modeling paradigms, and architectural choices. This diversity complicates efforts to evaluate models fairly and pinpoint which design choices most influence performance. While factors like data and architecture are important, in this study we focus exclusively on the modeling paradigm. We conduct a systematic empirical analysis to isolate its effects, offering insights into associated trade-offs and emergent behaviors that can guide future text-to-music generation systems. Specifically, we compare the two arguably most common modeling paradigms: Auto-Regressive decoding and Conditional Flow-Matching. We conduct a controlled comparison by training all models from scratch using identical datasets, training configurations, and similar backbone architectures. Performance is evaluated across multiple axes, including generation quality, robustness to inference configurations, scalability, adherence to both textual and temporally aligned conditioning, and editing capabilities in the form of audio inpainting. This comparative study sheds light on distinct strengths and limitations of each paradigm, providing actionable insights that can inform future architectural and training decisions in the evolving landscape of text-to-music generation. Audio sampled examples are available at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ortal1602/ARvsFM

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 10 2

IMAGINE-E: Image Generation Intelligence Evaluation of State-of-the-art Text-to-Image Models

With the rapid development of diffusion models, text-to-image(T2I) models have made significant progress, showcasing impressive abilities in prompt following and image generation. Recently launched models such as FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0, along with others like Dall-E3 and Stable Diffusion 3, have demonstrated exceptional performance across various complex tasks, raising questions about whether T2I models are moving towards general-purpose applicability. Beyond traditional image generation, these models exhibit capabilities across a range of fields, including controllable generation, image editing, video, audio, 3D, and motion generation, as well as computer vision tasks like semantic segmentation and depth estimation. However, current evaluation frameworks are insufficient to comprehensively assess these models' performance across expanding domains. To thoroughly evaluate these models, we developed the IMAGINE-E and tested six prominent models: FLUX.1, Ideogram2.0, Midjourney, Dall-E3, Stable Diffusion 3, and Jimeng. Our evaluation is divided into five key domains: structured output generation, realism, and physical consistency, specific domain generation, challenging scenario generation, and multi-style creation tasks. This comprehensive assessment highlights each model's strengths and limitations, particularly the outstanding performance of FLUX.1 and Ideogram2.0 in structured and specific domain tasks, underscoring the expanding applications and potential of T2I models as foundational AI tools. This study provides valuable insights into the current state and future trajectory of T2I models as they evolve towards general-purpose usability. Evaluation scripts will be released at https://github.com/jylei16/Imagine-e.

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

Current leading Text-To-Audio (TTA) generation models suffer from degraded performance on zero-shot and few-shot settings. It is often challenging to generate high-quality audio for audio events that are unseen or uncommon in the training set. Inspired by the success of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in Large Language Model (LLM)-based knowledge-intensive tasks, we extend the TTA process with additional conditioning contexts. We propose Audiobox TTA-RAG, a novel retrieval-augmented TTA approach based on Audiobox, a conditional flow-matching audio generation model. Unlike the vanilla Audiobox TTA solution which generates audio conditioned on text, we augmented the conditioning input with retrieved audio samples that provide additional acoustic information to generate the target audio. Our retrieval method does not require the external database to have labeled audio, offering more practical use cases. To evaluate our proposed method, we curated test sets in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our empirical results 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. In addition, we investigate the effect of different retrieval methods and data sources.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024

CLIPSonic: Text-to-Audio Synthesis with Unlabeled Videos and Pretrained Language-Vision Models

Recent work has studied text-to-audio synthesis using large amounts of paired text-audio data. However, audio recordings with high-quality text annotations can be difficult to acquire. In this work, we approach text-to-audio synthesis using unlabeled videos and pretrained language-vision models. We propose to learn the desired text-audio correspondence by leveraging the visual modality as a bridge. We train a conditional diffusion model to generate the audio track of a video, given a video frame encoded by a pretrained contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model. At test time, we first explore performing a zero-shot modality transfer and condition the diffusion model with a CLIP-encoded text query. However, we observe a noticeable performance drop with respect to image queries. To close this gap, we further adopt a pretrained diffusion prior model to generate a CLIP image embedding given a CLIP text embedding. Our results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, and that the pretrained diffusion prior can reduce the modality transfer gap. While we focus on text-to-audio synthesis, the proposed model can also generate audio from image queries, and it shows competitive performance against a state-of-the-art image-to-audio synthesis model in a subjective listening test. This study offers a new direction of approaching text-to-audio synthesis that leverages the naturally-occurring audio-visual correspondence in videos and the power of pretrained language-vision models.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 16, 2023

Tango 2: Aligning Diffusion-based Text-to-Audio Generations through Direct Preference Optimization

Generative multimodal content is increasingly prevalent in much of the content creation arena, as it has the potential to allow artists and media personnel to create pre-production mockups by quickly bringing their ideas to life. The generation of audio from text prompts is an important aspect of such processes in the music and film industry. Many of the recent diffusion-based text-to-audio models focus on training increasingly sophisticated diffusion models on a large set of datasets of prompt-audio pairs. These models do not explicitly focus on the presence of concepts or events and their temporal ordering in the output audio with respect to the input prompt. Our hypothesis is focusing on how these aspects of audio generation could improve audio generation performance in the presence of limited data. As such, in this work, using an existing text-to-audio model Tango, we synthetically create a preference dataset where each prompt has a winner audio output and some loser audio outputs for the diffusion model to learn from. The loser outputs, in theory, have some concepts from the prompt missing or in an incorrect order. We fine-tune the publicly available Tango text-to-audio model using diffusion-DPO (direct preference optimization) loss on our preference dataset and show that it leads to improved audio output over Tango and AudioLDM2, in terms of both automatic- and manual-evaluation metrics.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 15, 2024

Enhance Generation Quality of Flow Matching V2A Model via Multi-Step CoT-Like Guidance and Combined Preference Optimization

Creating high-quality sound effects from videos and text prompts requires precise alignment between visual and audio domains, both semantically and temporally, along with step-by-step guidance for professional audio generation. However, current state-of-the-art video-guided audio generation models often fall short of producing high-quality audio for both general and specialized use cases. To address this challenge, we introduce a multi-stage, multi-modal, end-to-end generative framework with Chain-of-Thought-like (CoT-like) guidance learning, termed Chain-of-Perform (CoP). First, we employ a transformer-based network architecture designed to achieve CoP guidance, enabling the generation of both general and professional audio. Second, we implement a multi-stage training framework that follows step-by-step guidance to ensure the generation of high-quality sound effects. Third, we develop a CoP multi-modal dataset, guided by video, to support step-by-step sound effects generation. Evaluation results highlight the advantages of the proposed multi-stage CoP generative framework compared to the state-of-the-art models on a variety of datasets, with FAD 0.79 to 0.74 (+6.33%), CLIP 16.12 to 17.70 (+9.80%) on VGGSound, SI-SDR 1.98dB to 3.35dB (+69.19%), MOS 2.94 to 3.49(+18.71%) on PianoYT-2h, and SI-SDR 2.22dB to 3.21dB (+44.59%), MOS 3.07 to 3.42 (+11.40%) on Piano-10h.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 28

Both Ears Wide Open: Towards Language-Driven Spatial Audio Generation

Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in mono-channel audio generation. However, when it comes to stereo audio generation, the soundscapes often have a complex scene of multiple objects and directions. Controlling stereo audio with spatial contexts remains challenging due to high data costs and unstable generative models. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to address these issues. We first construct a large-scale, simulation-based, and GPT-assisted dataset, BEWO-1M, with abundant soundscapes and descriptions even including moving and multiple sources. Beyond text modality, we have also acquired a set of images and rationally paired stereo audios through retrieval to advance multimodal generation. Existing audio generation models tend to generate rather random and indistinct spatial audio. To provide accurate guidance for Latent Diffusion Models, we introduce the SpatialSonic model utilizing spatial-aware encoders and azimuth state matrices to reveal reasonable spatial guidance. By leveraging spatial guidance, our model not only achieves the objective of generating immersive and controllable spatial audio from text but also extends to other modalities as the pioneer attempt. Finally, under fair settings, we conduct subjective and objective evaluations on simulated and real-world data to compare our approach with prevailing methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to generate spatial audio that adheres to physical rules.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 14, 2024

Synthio: Augmenting Small-Scale Audio Classification Datasets with Synthetic Data

We present Synthio, a novel approach for augmenting small-scale audio classification datasets with synthetic data. Our goal is to improve audio classification accuracy with limited labeled data. Traditional data augmentation techniques, which apply artificial transformations (e.g., adding random noise or masking segments), struggle to create data that captures the true diversity present in real-world audios. To address this shortcoming, we propose to augment the dataset with synthetic audio generated from text-to-audio (T2A) diffusion models. However, synthesizing effective augmentations is challenging because not only should the generated data be acoustically consistent with the underlying small-scale dataset, but they should also have sufficient compositional diversity. To overcome the first challenge, we align the generations of the T2A model with the small-scale dataset using preference optimization. This ensures that the acoustic characteristics of the generated data remain consistent with the small-scale dataset. To address the second challenge, we propose a novel caption generation technique that leverages the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models to (1) generate diverse and meaningful audio captions and (2) iteratively refine their quality. The generated captions are then used to prompt the aligned T2A model. We extensively evaluate Synthio on ten datasets and four simulated limited-data settings. Results indicate our method consistently outperforms all baselines by 0.1%-39% using a T2A model trained only on weakly-captioned AudioSet.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024 2

AudioGenie: A Training-Free Multi-Agent Framework for Diverse Multimodality-to-Multiaudio Generation

Multimodality-to-Multiaudio (MM2MA) generation faces significant challenges in synthesizing diverse and contextually aligned audio types (e.g., sound effects, speech, music, and songs) from multimodal inputs (e.g., video, text, images), owing to the scarcity of high-quality paired datasets and the lack of robust multi-task learning frameworks. Recently, multi-agent system shows great potential in tackling the above issues. However, directly applying it to MM2MA task presents three critical challenges: (1) inadequate fine-grained understanding of multimodal inputs (especially for video), (2) the inability of single models to handle diverse audio events, and (3) the absence of self-correction mechanisms for reliable outputs. To this end, we propose AudioGenie, a novel training-free multi-agent system featuring a dual-layer architecture with a generation team and a supervisor team. For the generation team, a fine-grained task decomposition and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) collaborative entity are designed for dynamic model selection, and a trial-and-error iterative refinement module is designed for self-correction. The supervisor team ensures temporal-spatial consistency and verifies outputs through feedback loops. Moreover, we build MA-Bench, the first benchmark for MM2MA tasks, comprising 198 annotated videos with multi-type audios. Experiments demonstrate that our AudioGenie outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across 9 metrics in 8 tasks. User study further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of quality, accuracy, alignment, and aesthetic. The anonymous project website with samples can be found at https://audiogenie.github.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
May 28

Enhancing Low-Resource Language and Instruction Following Capabilities of Audio Language Models

Audio language models can understand audio inputs and perform a range of audio-related tasks based on instructions, such as speech recognition and audio captioning, where the instructions are usually textual prompts. Audio language models are mostly initialized from pre-trained audio encoders and large language models (LLMs). Although these pre-trained components were developed to support multiple languages, audio-language models are trained predominantly on English data, which may limit their usability to only English instructions or English speech inputs. First, this paper examines the performance of existing audio language models in an underserved language using Thai as an example. This paper demonstrates that, despite being built on multilingual backbones, audio language models do not exhibit cross-lingual emergent abilities to low-resource languages. Second, this paper studies data mixture for developing audio language models that are optimized for a target language as well as English. In addition. this paper integrates audio comprehension and speech instruction-following capabilities into a single unified model. Our experiments provide insights into data mixture for enhancing instruction-following capabilities in both a low-resource language and English. Our model, Typhoon-Audio, outperforms existing open-source audio language models by a considerable margin, and it is comparable to state-of-the-art Gemini-1.5-Pro in both English and Thai languages.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17, 2024

Apollo: Band-sequence Modeling for High-Quality Audio Restoration

Audio restoration has become increasingly significant in modern society, not only due to the demand for high-quality auditory experiences enabled by advanced playback devices, but also because the growing capabilities of generative audio models necessitate high-fidelity audio. Typically, audio restoration is defined as a task of predicting undistorted audio from damaged input, often trained using a GAN framework to balance perception and distortion. Since audio degradation is primarily concentrated in mid- and high-frequency ranges, especially due to codecs, a key challenge lies in designing a generator capable of preserving low-frequency information while accurately reconstructing high-quality mid- and high-frequency content. Inspired by recent advancements in high-sample-rate music separation, speech enhancement, and audio codec models, we propose Apollo, a generative model designed for high-sample-rate audio restoration. Apollo employs an explicit frequency band split module to model the relationships between different frequency bands, allowing for more coherent and higher-quality restored audio. Evaluated on the MUSDB18-HQ and MoisesDB datasets, Apollo consistently outperforms existing SR-GAN models across various bit rates and music genres, particularly excelling in complex scenarios involving mixtures of multiple instruments and vocals. Apollo significantly improves music restoration quality while maintaining computational efficiency. The source code for Apollo is publicly available at https://github.com/JusperLee/Apollo.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024 2

Audio-Language Models for Audio-Centric Tasks: A survey

Audio-Language Models (ALMs), which are trained on audio-text data, focus on the processing, understanding, and reasoning of sounds. Unlike traditional supervised learning approaches learning from predefined labels, ALMs utilize natural language as a supervision signal, which is more suitable for describing complex real-world audio recordings. ALMs demonstrate strong zero-shot capabilities and can be flexibly adapted to diverse downstream tasks. These strengths not only enhance the accuracy and generalization of audio processing tasks but also promote the development of models that more closely resemble human auditory perception and comprehension. Recent advances in ALMs have positioned them at the forefront of computer audition research, inspiring a surge of efforts to advance ALM technologies. Despite rapid progress in the field of ALMs, there is still a notable lack of systematic surveys that comprehensively organize and analyze developments. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of ALMs with a focus on general audio tasks, aiming to fill this gap by providing a structured and holistic overview of ALMs. Specifically, we cover: (1) the background of computer audition and audio-language models; (2) the foundational aspects of ALMs, including prevalent network architectures, training objectives, and evaluation methods; (3) foundational pre-training and audio-language pre-training approaches; (4) task-specific fine-tuning, multi-task tuning and agent systems for downstream applications; (5) datasets and benchmarks; and (6) current challenges and future directions. Our review provides a clear technical roadmap for researchers to understand the development and future trends of existing technologies, offering valuable references for implementation in real-world scenarios.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 25

Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models

Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for audio interaction with humans. However, the absence of pre-trained audio models capable of handling diverse audio types and tasks has hindered progress in this field. Consequently, most existing works have only been able to support a limited range of interaction capabilities. In this paper, we develop the Qwen-Audio model and address this limitation by scaling up audio-language pre-training to cover over 30 tasks and various audio types, such as human speech, natural sounds, music, and songs, to facilitate universal audio understanding abilities. However, directly co-training all tasks and datasets can lead to interference issues, as the textual labels associated with different datasets exhibit considerable variations due to differences in task focus, language, granularity of annotation, and text structure. To overcome the one-to-many interference, we carefully design a multi-task training framework by conditioning on a sequence of hierarchical tags to the decoder for encouraging knowledge sharing and avoiding interference through shared and specified tags respectively. Remarkably, Qwen-Audio achieves impressive performance across diverse benchmark tasks without requiring any task-specific fine-tuning, surpassing its counterparts. Building upon the capabilities of Qwen-Audio, we further develop Qwen-Audio-Chat, which allows for input from various audios and text inputs, enabling multi-turn dialogues and supporting various audio-central scenarios.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

Takin: A Cohort of Superior Quality Zero-shot Speech Generation Models

With the advent of the big data and large language model era, zero-shot personalized rapid customization has emerged as a significant trend. In this report, we introduce Takin AudioLLM, a series of techniques and models, mainly including Takin TTS, Takin VC, and Takin Morphing, specifically designed for audiobook production. These models are capable of zero-shot speech production, generating high-quality speech that is nearly indistinguishable from real human speech and facilitating individuals to customize the speech content according to their own needs. Specifically, we first introduce Takin TTS, a neural codec language model that builds upon an enhanced neural speech codec and a multi-task training framework, capable of generating high-fidelity natural speech in a zero-shot way. For Takin VC, we advocate an effective content and timbre joint modeling approach to improve the speaker similarity, while advocating for a conditional flow matching based decoder to further enhance its naturalness and expressiveness. Last, we propose the Takin Morphing system with highly decoupled and advanced timbre and prosody modeling approaches, which enables individuals to customize speech production with their preferred timbre and prosody in a precise and controllable manner. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and robustness of our Takin AudioLLM series models. For detailed demos, please refer to https://takinaudiollm.github.io.

  • 19 authors
·
Sep 18, 2024 4

Acoustic Prompt Tuning: Empowering Large Language Models with Audition Capabilities

The auditory system plays a substantial role in shaping the overall human perceptual experience. While prevailing large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) have shown their promise in solving a wide variety of vision and language understanding tasks, only a few of them can be generalised to the audio domain without compromising their domain-specific capacity. In this work, we introduce Acoustic Prompt Turning (APT), a new adapter extending LLMs and VLMs to the audio domain by soft prompting only. Specifically, APT applies an instruction-aware audio aligner to generate soft prompts, conditioned on both input text and sounds, as language model inputs. To mitigate the data scarcity in the audio domain, a multi-task learning strategy is proposed by formulating diverse audio tasks in a sequence-to-sequence manner. Moreover, we improve the framework of audio language model by using interleaved audio-text embeddings as the input sequence. This improved framework imposes zero constraints on the input format and thus is capable of tackling more understanding tasks, such as few-shot audio classification and audio reasoning. To further evaluate the reasoning ability of audio networks, we propose natural language audio reasoning (NLAR), a new task that analyses across two audio clips by comparison and summarization. Experiments show that APT-enhanced LLMs (namely APT-LLMs) achieve competitive results compared to the expert models (i.e., the networks trained on the targeted datasets) across various tasks. We finally demonstrate the APT's ability in extending frozen VLMs to the audio domain without finetuning, achieving promising results in the audio-visual question and answering task. Our code and model weights are released at https://github.com/JinhuaLiang/APT.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 30, 2023

FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events

Most existing datasets for sound event recognition (SER) are relatively small and/or domain-specific, with the exception of AudioSet, based on over 2M tracks from YouTube videos and encompassing over 500 sound classes. However, AudioSet is not an open dataset as its official release consists of pre-computed audio features. Downloading the original audio tracks can be problematic due to YouTube videos gradually disappearing and usage rights issues. To provide an alternative benchmark dataset and thus foster SER research, we introduce FSD50K, an open dataset containing over 51k audio clips totalling over 100h of audio manually labeled using 200 classes drawn from the AudioSet Ontology. The audio clips are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, making the dataset freely distributable (including waveforms). We provide a detailed description of the FSD50K creation process, tailored to the particularities of Freesound data, including challenges encountered and solutions adopted. We include a comprehensive dataset characterization along with discussion of limitations and key factors to allow its audio-informed usage. Finally, we conduct sound event classification experiments to provide baseline systems as well as insight on the main factors to consider when splitting Freesound audio data for SER. Our goal is to develop a dataset to be widely adopted by the community as a new open benchmark for SER research.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1, 2020