Daily Papers

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation is important for video editing and post-processing, enabling the creation of semantics-aligned audio for silent video. However, most existing methods focus on generating short-form audio for short video segment (less than 10 seconds), while giving little attention to the scenario of long-form video inputs. For current UNet-based diffusion V2A models, an inevitable problem when handling long-form audio generation is the inconsistencies within the final concatenated audio. In this paper, we first highlight the importance of long-form V2A problem. Besides, we propose LoVA, a novel model for Long-form Video-to-Audio generation. Based on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, LoVA proves to be more effective at generating long-form audio compared to existing autoregressive models and UNet-based diffusion models. Extensive objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that LoVA achieves comparable performance on 10-second V2A benchmark and outperforms all other baselines on a benchmark with long-form video input.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are often constrained by short audio context windows, even when their text backbones support long contexts, limiting long-form audio understanding. Prior work has introduced context-extension methods (e.g. YaRN) on unimodal LLMs, yet their application to LALMs remains unexplored. First, building on RoPE-based context extension, we introduce Partial YaRN, a training-free, audio-only extension method that modifies only audio token positions, leaving text positions intact to preserve the base LLM's text capabilities. Second, we propose Virtual Longform Audio Training (VLAT), a training strategy that extends Partial YaRN into a training-time positional augmentation. VLAT simulates diverse audio lengths during training, enabling generalization to inputs far longer than those seen in training and improving robustness for long-context audio understanding. Our experiments on SALMONN and Qwen2-Audio show that Partial YaRN outperforms the original models across wide range of settings, and VLAT training strategy provides substantial improvement, achieving strong performance on long audio of unseen lengths.

Recent advances in text-to-audio (TTA) generation excel at synthesizing short audio clips but struggle with long-form narrative audio, which requires temporal coherence and compositional reasoning. To address this gap, we propose AudioStory, a unified framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with TTA systems to generate structured, long-form audio narratives. AudioStory possesses strong instruction-following reasoning generation capabilities. It employs LLMs to decompose complex narrative queries into temporally ordered sub-tasks with contextual cues, enabling coherent scene transitions and emotional tone consistency. AudioStory has two appealing features: (1) Decoupled bridging mechanism: AudioStory disentangles LLM-diffuser collaboration into two specialized components, i.e., a bridging query for intra-event semantic alignment and a residual query for cross-event coherence preservation. (2) End-to-end training: By unifying instruction comprehension and audio generation within a single end-to-end framework, AudioStory eliminates the need for modular training pipelines while enhancing synergy between components. Furthermore, we establish a benchmark AudioStory-10K, encompassing diverse domains such as animated soundscapes and natural sound narratives. Extensive experiments show the superiority of AudioStory on both single-audio generation and narrative audio generation, surpassing prior TTA baselines in both instruction-following ability and audio fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentARC/AudioStory

Modeling temporal characteristics plays a significant role in the representation learning of audio waveform. We propose Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining (CoLLAP) to significantly extend the perception window for both the input audio (up to 5 minutes) and the language descriptions (exceeding 250 words), while enabling contrastive learning across modalities and temporal dynamics. Leveraging recent Music-LLMs to generate long-form music captions for full-length songs, augmented with musical temporal structures, we collect 51.3K audio-text pairs derived from the large-scale AudioSet training dataset, where the average audio length reaches 288 seconds. We propose a novel contrastive learning architecture that fuses language representations with structured audio representations by segmenting each song into clips and extracting their embeddings. With an attention mechanism, we capture multimodal temporal correlations, allowing the model to automatically weigh and enhance the final fusion score for improved contrastive alignment. Finally, we develop two variants of the CoLLAP model with different types of backbone language models. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple long-form music-text retrieval datasets, we demonstrate consistent performance improvement in retrieval accuracy compared with baselines. We also show the pretrained CoLLAP models can be transferred to various music information retrieval tasks, with heterogeneous long-form multimodal contexts.

Large-scale, weakly-supervised speech recognition models, such as Whisper, have demonstrated impressive results on speech recognition across domains and languages. However, their application to long audio transcription via buffered or sliding window approaches is prone to drifting, hallucination & repetition; and prohibits batched transcription due to their sequential nature. Further, timestamps corresponding each utterance are prone to inaccuracies and word-level timestamps are not available out-of-the-box. To overcome these challenges, we present WhisperX, a time-accurate speech recognition system with word-level timestamps utilising voice activity detection and forced phoneme alignment. In doing so, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on long-form transcription and word segmentation benchmarks. Additionally, we show that pre-segmenting audio with our proposed VAD Cut & Merge strategy improves transcription quality and enables a twelve-fold transcription speedup via batched inference.

Processing long-form audio is a major challenge for Large Audio Language models (LALMs). These models struggle with the quadratic cost of attention (O(N^2)) and with modeling long-range temporal dependencies. Existing audio benchmarks are built mostly from short clips and do not evaluate models in realistic long context settings. To address this gap, we introduce AudioMarathon, a benchmark designed to evaluate both understanding and inference efficiency on long-form audio. AudioMarathon provides a diverse set of tasks built upon three pillars: long-context audio inputs with durations ranging from 90.0 to 300.0 seconds, which correspond to encoded sequences of 2,250 to 7,500 audio tokens, respectively, full domain coverage across speech, sound, and music, and complex reasoning that requires multi-hop inference. We evaluate state-of-the-art LALMs and observe clear performance drops as audio length grows. We also study acceleration techniques and analyze the trade-offs of token pruning and KV cache eviction. The results show large gaps across current LALMs and highlight the need for better temporal reasoning and memory-efficient architectures. We believe AudioMarathon will drive the audio and multimodal research community to develop more advanced audio understanding models capable of solving complex audio tasks.

Developing large audio language models (LMs) capable of understanding diverse spoken interactions is essential for accommodating the multimodal nature of human communication and can increase the accessibility of language technologies across different user populations. Recent work on audio LMs has primarily evaluated their performance on short audio segments, typically under 30 seconds, with limited exploration of long-form conversational speech segments that more closely reflect natural user interactions with these models. We introduce Brutally Long Audio Bench (BLAB), a challenging long-form audio benchmark that evaluates audio LMs on localization, duration estimation, emotion, and counting tasks using audio segments averaging 51 minutes in length. BLAB consists of 833+ hours of diverse, full-length audio clips, each paired with human-annotated, text-based natural language questions and answers. Our audio data were collected from permissively licensed sources and underwent a human-assisted filtering process to ensure task compliance. We evaluate six open-source and proprietary audio LMs on BLAB and find that all of them, including advanced models such as Gemini 2.0 Pro and GPT-4o, struggle with the tasks in BLAB. Our comprehensive analysis reveals key insights into the trade-offs between task difficulty and audio duration. In general, we find that audio LMs struggle with long-form speech, with performance declining as duration increases. They perform poorly on localization, temporal reasoning, counting, and struggle to understand non-phonemic information, relying more on prompts than audio content. BLAB serves as a challenging evaluation framework to develop audio LMs with robust long-form audio understanding capabilities.

Deploying ASR models at an industrial scale poses significant challenges in hardware resource management, especially for long-form transcription tasks where audio may last for hours. Large Conformer models, despite their capabilities, are limited to processing only 15 minutes of audio on an 80GB GPU. Furthermore, variable input lengths worsen inefficiencies, as standard batching leads to excessive padding, increasing resource consumption and execution time. To address this, we introduce ChunkFormer, an efficient ASR model that uses chunk-wise processing with relative right context, enabling long audio transcriptions on low-memory GPUs. ChunkFormer handles up to 16 hours of audio on an 80GB GPU, 1.5x longer than the current state-of-the-art FastConformer, while also boosting long-form transcription performance with up to 7.7% absolute reduction on word error rate and maintaining accuracy on shorter tasks compared to Conformer. By eliminating the need for padding in standard batching, ChunkFormer's masked batching technique reduces execution time and memory usage by more than 3x in batch processing, substantially reducing costs for a wide range of ASR systems, particularly regarding GPU resources for models serving in real-world applications.

In this paper, we introduce a novel language identification system based on conformer layers. We propose an attentive temporal pooling mechanism to allow the model to carry information in long-form audio via a recurrent form, such that the inference can be performed in a streaming fashion. Additionally, we investigate two domain adaptation approaches to allow adapting an existing language identification model without retraining the model parameters for a new domain. We perform a comparative study of different model topologies under different constraints of model size, and find that conformer-based models significantly outperform LSTM and transformer based models. Our experiments also show that attentive temporal pooling and domain adaptation improve model accuracy.

We present MGM-Omni, a unified Omni LLM for omni-modal understanding and expressive, long-horizon speech generation. Unlike cascaded pipelines that isolate speech synthesis, MGM-Omni adopts a "brain-mouth" design with a dual-track, token-based architecture that cleanly decouples multimodal reasoning from real-time speech generation. This design enables efficient cross-modal interaction and low-latency, streaming speech generation. For understanding, a unified training strategy coupled with a dual audio encoder design enables long-form audio perception across diverse acoustic conditions. For generation, a chunk-based parallel decoding scheme narrows the text speech token-rate gap, accelerating inference and supporting streaming zero-shot voice cloning with stable timbre over extended durations. Compared to concurrent work, MGM-Omni achieves these capabilities with markedly data-efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGM-Omni outperforms existing open source models in preserving timbre identity across extended sequences, producing natural and context-aware speech, and achieving superior long-form audio and omnimodal understanding. MGM-Omni establishes an efficient, end-to-end paradigm for omnimodal understanding and controllable, personalised long-horizon speech generation.

Audio comprehension-including speech, non-speech sounds, and music-is essential for achieving human-level intelligence. Consequently, AI agents must demonstrate holistic audio understanding to qualify as generally intelligent. However, evaluating auditory intelligence comprehensively remains challenging. To address this gap, we introduce MMAU-Pro, the most comprehensive and rigorously curated benchmark for assessing audio intelligence in AI systems. MMAU-Pro contains 5,305 instances, where each instance has one or more audios paired with human expert-generated question-answer pairs, spanning speech, sound, music, and their combinations. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU-Pro evaluates auditory intelligence across 49 unique skills and multiple complex dimensions, including long-form audio comprehension, spatial audio reasoning, multi-audio understanding, among others. All questions are meticulously designed to require deliberate multi-hop reasoning, including both multiple-choice and open-ended response formats. Importantly, audio data is sourced directly ``from the wild" rather than from existing datasets with known distributions. We evaluate 22 leading open-source and proprietary multimodal AI models, revealing significant limitations: even state-of-the-art models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and Audio Flamingo 3 achieve only 59.2% and 51.7% accuracy, respectively, approaching random performance in multiple categories. Our extensive analysis highlights specific shortcomings and provides novel insights, offering actionable perspectives for the community to enhance future AI systems' progression toward audio general intelligence. The benchmark and code is available at https://sonalkum.github.io/mmau-pro.

Evaluating personalized recommendations remains a central challenge, especially in long-form audio domains like podcasts, where traditional offline metrics suffer from exposure bias and online methods such as A/B testing are costly and operationally constrained. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as offline judges to assess the quality of podcast recommendations in a scalable and interpretable manner. Our two-stage profile-aware approach first constructs natural-language user profiles distilled from 90 days of listening history. These profiles summarize both topical interests and behavioral patterns, serving as compact, interpretable representations of user preferences. Rather than prompting the LLM with raw data, we use these profiles to provide high-level, semantically rich context-enabling the LLM to reason more effectively about alignment between a user's interests and recommended episodes. This reduces input complexity and improves interpretability. The LLM is then prompted to deliver fine-grained pointwise and pairwise judgments based on the profile-episode match. In a controlled study with 47 participants, our profile-aware judge matched human judgments with high fidelity and outperformed or matched a variant using raw listening histories. The framework enables efficient, profile-aware evaluation for iterative testing and model selection in recommender systems.

This paper presents a new approach to fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper model for low-resource languages by introducing a novel data generation method that converts sentence-level data into a long-form corpus, using Swiss German as a case study. Non-sentence-level data, which could improve the performance of long-form audio, is difficult to obtain and often restricted by copyright laws. Our method bridges this gap by transforming more accessible sentence-level data into a format that preserves the model's ability to handle long-form audio and perform segmentation without requiring non-sentence-level data. Our data generation process improves performance in several real-world applications and leads to the development of a new state-of-the-art speech-to-text (STT) model for Swiss German. We compare our model with a non-fine-tuned Whisper and our previous state-of-the-art Swiss German STT models, where our new model achieves higher BLEU scores. Our results also indicate that the proposed method is adaptable to other low-resource languages, supported by written guidance and code that allows the creation of fine-tuned Whisper models, which keep segmentation capabilities and allow the transcription of longer audio files using only sentence-level data with high quality.

Large language models have proven themselves highly flexible, able to solve a wide range of generative tasks, such as abstractive summarization and open-ended question answering. In this paper we extend the capabilities of LLMs by directly attaching a small audio encoder allowing it to perform speech recognition. By directly prepending a sequence of audial embeddings to the text token embeddings, the LLM can be converted to an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, and be used in the exact same manner as its textual counterpart. Experiments on Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) show that incorporating a conformer encoder into the open sourced LLaMA-7B allows it to outperform monolingual baselines by 18% and perform multilingual speech recognition despite LLaMA being trained overwhelmingly on English text. Furthermore, we perform ablation studies to investigate whether the LLM can be completely frozen during training to maintain its original capabilities, scaling up the audio encoder, and increasing the audio encoder striding to generate fewer embeddings. The results from these studies show that multilingual ASR is possible even when the LLM is frozen or when strides of almost 1 second are used in the audio encoder opening up the possibility for LLMs to operate on long-form audio.

As the size of pre-trained speech recognition models increases, running these large models in low-latency or resource-constrained environments becomes challenging. In this work, we leverage pseudo-labelling to assemble a large-scale open-source dataset which we use to distill the Whisper model into a smaller variant, called Distil-Whisper. Using a simple word error rate (WER) heuristic, we select only the highest quality pseudo-labels for training. The distilled model is 5.8 times faster with 51% fewer parameters, while performing to within 1% WER on out-of-distribution test data in a zero-shot transfer setting. Distil-Whisper maintains the robustness of the Whisper model to difficult acoustic conditions, while being less prone to hallucination errors on long-form audio. Distil-Whisper is designed to be paired with Whisper for speculative decoding, yielding a 2 times speed-up while mathematically ensuring the same outputs as the original model. To facilitate further research in this domain, we make our training code, inference code and models publicly accessible.

A major drawback of supervised speech separation (SSep) systems is their reliance on synthetic data, leading to poor real-world generalization. Mixture invariant training (MixIT) was proposed as an unsupervised alternative that uses real recordings, yet struggles with overseparation and adapting to long-form audio. We introduce PixIT, a joint approach that combines permutation invariant training (PIT) for speaker diarization (SD) and MixIT for SSep. With a small extra requirement of needing SD labels, it solves the problem of overseparation and allows stitching local separated sources leveraging existing work on clustering-based neural SD. We measure the quality of the separated sources via applying automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to them. PixIT boosts the performance of various ASR systems across two meeting corpora both in terms of the speaker-attributed and utterance-based word error rates while not requiring any fine-tuning.

We consider the generative modeling of speech over multiple minutes, a requirement for long-form multimedia generation and audio-native voice assistants. However, current spoken language models struggle to generate plausible speech past tens of seconds, from high temporal resolution of speech tokens causing loss of coherence, to architectural issues with long-sequence training or extrapolation, to memory costs at inference time. With these considerations we propose SpeechSSM, the first speech language model to learn from and sample long-form spoken audio (e.g., 16 minutes of read or extemporaneous speech) in a single decoding session without text intermediates, based on recent advances in linear-time sequence modeling. Furthermore, to address growing challenges in spoken language evaluation, especially in this new long-form setting, we propose: new embedding-based and LLM-judged metrics; quality measurements over length and time; and a new benchmark for long-form speech processing and generation, LibriSpeech-Long. Speech samples and the dataset are released at https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speechssm/

Listeners of long-form talk-audio content, such as podcast episodes, often find it challenging to understand the overall structure and locate relevant sections. A practical solution is to divide episodes into chapters--semantically coherent segments labeled with titles and timestamps. Since most episodes on our platform at Spotify currently lack creator-provided chapters, automating the creation of chapters is essential. Scaling the chapterization of podcast episodes presents unique challenges. First, episodes tend to be less structured than written texts, featuring spontaneous discussions with nuanced transitions. Second, the transcripts are usually lengthy, averaging about 16,000 tokens, which necessitates efficient processing that can preserve context. To address these challenges, we introduce PODTILE, a fine-tuned encoder-decoder transformer to segment conversational data. The model simultaneously generates chapter transitions and titles for the input transcript. To preserve context, each input text is augmented with global context, including the episode's title, description, and previous chapter titles. In our intrinsic evaluation, PODTILE achieved an 11% improvement in ROUGE score over the strongest baseline. Additionally, we provide insights into the practical benefits of auto-generated chapters for listeners navigating episode content. Our findings indicate that auto-generated chapters serve as a useful tool for engaging with less popular podcasts. Finally, we present empirical evidence that using chapter titles can enhance effectiveness of sparse retrieval in search tasks.

Generating long-form 44.1kHz stereo audio from text prompts can be computationally demanding. Further, most previous works do not tackle that music and sound effects naturally vary in their duration. Our research focuses on the efficient generation of long-form, variable-length stereo music and sounds at 44.1kHz using text prompts with a generative model. Stable Audio is based on latent diffusion, with its latent defined by a fully-convolutional variational autoencoder. It is conditioned on text prompts as well as timing embeddings, allowing for fine control over both the content and length of the generated music and sounds. Stable Audio is capable of rendering stereo signals of up to 95 sec at 44.1kHz in 8 sec on an A100 GPU. Despite its compute efficiency and fast inference, it is one of the best in two public text-to-music and -audio benchmarks and, differently from state-of-the-art models, can generate music with structure and stereo sounds.

Audio-based generative models for music have seen great strides recently, but so far have not managed to produce full-length music tracks with coherent musical structure. We show that by training a generative model on long temporal contexts it is possible to produce long-form music of up to 4m45s. Our model consists of a diffusion-transformer operating on a highly downsampled continuous latent representation (latent rate of 21.5Hz). It obtains state-of-the-art generations according to metrics on audio quality and prompt alignment, and subjective tests reveal that it produces full-length music with coherent structure.

We propose a novel approach for automatic chaptering of TV newscast videos, addressing the challenge of structuring and organizing large collections of unsegmented broadcast content. Our method integrates both audio and visual cues through a two-stage process involving frozen neural networks and a trained LSTM network. The first stage extracts essential features from separate modalities, while the LSTM effectively fuses these features to generate accurate segment boundaries. Our proposed model has been evaluated on a diverse dataset comprising over 500 TV newscast videos of an average of 41 minutes gathered from TF1, a French TV channel, with varying lengths and topics. Experimental results demonstrate that this innovative fusion strategy achieves state of the art performance, yielding a high precision rate of 82% at IoU of 90%. Consequently, this approach significantly enhances analysis, indexing and storage capabilities for TV newscast archives, paving the way towards efficient management and utilization of vast audiovisual resources.

Video-to-audio synthesis, which generates synchronized audio for visual content, critically enhances viewer immersion and narrative coherence in film and interactive media. However, video-to-audio dubbing for long-form content remains an unsolved challenge due to dynamic semantic shifts, temporal misalignment, and the absence of dedicated datasets. While existing methods excel in short videos, they falter in long scenarios (e.g., movies) due to fragmented synthesis and inadequate cross-scene consistency. We propose LVAS-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework that emulates professional dubbing workflows through collaborative role specialization. Our approach decomposes long-video synthesis into four steps including scene segmentation, script generation, sound design and audio synthesis. Central innovations include a discussion-correction mechanism for scene/script refinement and a generation-retrieval loop for temporal-semantic alignment. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce LVAS-Bench, the first benchmark with 207 professionally curated long videos spanning diverse scenarios. Experiments demonstrate superior audio-visual alignment over baseline methods. Project page: https://lvas-agent.github.io

ASR models often suffer from a long-form deletion problem where the model predicts sequential blanks instead of words when transcribing a lengthy audio (in the order of minutes or hours). From the perspective of a user or downstream system consuming the ASR results, this behavior can be perceived as the model "being stuck", and potentially make the product hard to use. One of the culprits for long-form deletion is training-test data mismatch, which can happen even when the model is trained on diverse and large-scale data collected from multiple application domains. In this work, we introduce a novel technique to simultaneously model different groups of speakers in the audio along with the standard transcript tokens. Speakers are grouped as primary and non-primary, which connects the application domains and significantly alleviates the long-form deletion problem. This improved model neither needs any additional training data nor incurs additional training or inference cost.

We introduce InspireMusic, a framework integrated super resolution and large language model for high-fidelity long-form music generation. A unified framework generates high-fidelity music, songs, and audio, which incorporates an autoregressive transformer with a super-resolution flow-matching model. This framework enables the controllable generation of high-fidelity long-form music at a higher sampling rate from both text and audio prompts. Our model differs from previous approaches, as we utilize an audio tokenizer with one codebook that contains richer semantic information, thereby reducing training costs and enhancing efficiency. This combination enables us to achieve high-quality audio generation with long-form coherence of up to 8 minutes. Then, an autoregressive transformer model based on Qwen 2.5 predicts audio tokens. Next, we employ a super-resolution flow-matching model to generate high-sampling rate audio with fine-grained details learned from an acoustic codec model. Comprehensive experiments show that the InspireMusic-1.5B-Long model has a comparable performance to recent top-tier open-source systems, including MusicGen and Stable Audio 2.0, on subjective and objective evaluations. The code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/FunAudioLLM/InspireMusic.

We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting.

Humans naturally understand moments in a video by integrating visual and auditory cues. For example, localizing a scene in the video like "A scientist passionately speaks on wildlife conservation as dramatic orchestral music plays, with the audience nodding and applauding" requires simultaneous processing of visual, audio, and speech signals. However, existing models often struggle to effectively fuse and interpret audio information, limiting their capacity for comprehensive video temporal understanding. To address this, we present TriSense, a triple-modality large language model designed for holistic video temporal understanding through the integration of visual, audio, and speech modalities. Central to TriSense is a Query-Based Connector that adaptively reweights modality contributions based on the input query, enabling robust performance under modality dropout and allowing flexible combinations of available inputs. To support TriSense's multimodal capabilities, we introduce TriSense-2M, a high-quality dataset of over 2 million curated samples generated via an automated pipeline powered by fine-tuned LLMs. TriSense-2M includes long-form videos and diverse modality combinations, facilitating broad generalization. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of TriSense and its potential to advance multimodal video analysis. Code and dataset will be publicly released.

Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for audio-driven character animation demonstrate promising performance for scenarios primarily involving speech and singing. However, they often fall short in more complex film and television productions, which demand sophisticated elements such as nuanced character interactions, realistic body movements, and dynamic camera work. To address this long-standing challenge of achieving film-level character animation, we propose an audio-driven model, which we refere to as Wan-S2V, built upon Wan. Our model achieves significantly enhanced expressiveness and fidelity in cinematic contexts compared to existing approaches. We conducted extensive experiments, benchmarking our method against cutting-edge models such as Hunyuan-Avatar and Omnihuman. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms these existing solutions. Additionally, we explore the versatility of our method through its applications in long-form video generation and precise video lip-sync editing.

The recent and increasing interest in video-language research has driven the development of large-scale datasets that enable data-intensive machine learning techniques. In comparison, limited effort has been made at assessing the fitness of these datasets for the video-language grounding task. Recent works have begun to discover significant limitations in these datasets, suggesting that state-of-the-art techniques commonly overfit to hidden dataset biases. In this work, we present MAD (Movie Audio Descriptions), a novel benchmark that departs from the paradigm of augmenting existing video datasets with text annotations and focuses on crawling and aligning available audio descriptions of mainstream movies. MAD contains over 384,000 natural language sentences grounded in over 1,200 hours of videos and exhibits a significant reduction in the currently diagnosed biases for video-language grounding datasets. MAD's collection strategy enables a novel and more challenging version of video-language grounding, where short temporal moments (typically seconds long) must be accurately grounded in diverse long-form videos that can last up to three hours. We have released MAD's data and baselines code at https://github.com/Soldelli/MAD.

Recommending long-form video content demands joint modeling of visual, audio, and textual modalities, yet most benchmarks address only raw features or narrow fusion. We present ViLLA-MMBench, a reproducible, extensible benchmark for LLM-augmented multimodal movie recommendation. Built on MovieLens and MMTF-14K, it aligns dense item embeddings from three modalities: audio (block-level, i-vector), visual (CNN, AVF), and text. Missing or sparse metadata is automatically enriched using state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., OpenAI Ada), generating high-quality synopses for thousands of movies. All text (raw or augmented) is embedded with configurable encoders (Ada, LLaMA-2, Sentence-T5), producing multiple ready-to-use sets. The pipeline supports interchangeable early-, mid-, and late-fusion (concatenation, PCA, CCA, rank-aggregation) and multiple backbones (MF, VAECF, VBPR, AMR, VMF) for ablation. Experiments are fully declarative via a single YAML file. Evaluation spans accuracy (Recall, nDCG) and beyond-accuracy metrics: cold-start rate, coverage, novelty, diversity, fairness. Results show LLM-based augmentation and strong text embeddings boost cold-start and coverage, especially when fused with audio-visual features. Systematic benchmarking reveals universal versus backbone- or metric-specific combinations. Open-source code, embeddings, and configs enable reproducible, fair multimodal RS research and advance principled generative AI integration in large-scale recommendation. Code: https://recsys-lab.github.io/ViLLA-MMBench

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages like Slovak is hindered by the scarcity of training data. To address this, we introduce SloPalSpeech, a new, large-scale Slovak ASR dataset containing 2,806 hours of speech from parliamentary proceedings. We developed a robust processing pipeline to align and segment long-form recordings into clean, 30-second audio-transcript pairs suitable for model training. We use this dataset to fine-tune several OpenAI Whisper models (small, medium, large-v3, and large-v3-turbo), achieving significant Word Error Rate (WER) reductions on standard Slovak benchmarks like Common Voice and FLEURS. For instance, the fine-tuned Whisper-small model's WER dropped by up to 70\%, approaching the baseline performance of the much larger Whisper-large-v3 model. To foster future research in low-resource speech recognition, we publicly release the complete SloPalSpeech dataset, the fully segmented transcripts (60 million words), and all our fine-tuned models.

We present MM-VID, an integrated system that harnesses the capabilities of GPT-4V, combined with specialized tools in vision, audio, and speech, to facilitate advanced video understanding. MM-VID is designed to address the challenges posed by long-form videos and intricate tasks such as reasoning within hour-long content and grasping storylines spanning multiple episodes. MM-VID uses a video-to-script generation with GPT-4V to transcribe multimodal elements into a long textual script. The generated script details character movements, actions, expressions, and dialogues, paving the way for large language models (LLMs) to achieve video understanding. This enables advanced capabilities, including audio description, character identification, and multimodal high-level comprehension. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-VID in handling distinct video genres with various video lengths. Additionally, we showcase its potential when applied to interactive environments, such as video games and graphic user interfaces.

Automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) remains a challenging task in the field of music information retrieval, despite great advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) brought about by transformer-based architectures in recent years. One of the major challenges in ALT is the high amplitude of interfering audio signals relative to conventional ASR due to musical accompaniment. Recent advances in music source separation have enabled automatic extraction of high-quality separated vocals, which could potentially improve ALT performance. However, the effect of source separation has not been systematically investigated in order to establish best practices for its use. This work examines the impact of source separation on ALT using Whisper, a state-of-the-art open source ASR model. We evaluate Whisper's performance on original audio, separated vocals, and vocal stems across short-form and long-form transcription tasks. For short-form, we suggest a concatenation method that results in a consistent reduction in Word Error Rate (WER). For long-form, we propose an algorithm using source separation as a vocal activity detector to derive segment boundaries, which results in a consistent reduction in WER relative to Whisper's native long-form algorithm. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for an open source system on the Jam-ALT long-form ALT benchmark, without any training or fine-tuning. We also publish MUSDB-ALT, the first dataset of long-form lyric transcripts following the Jam-ALT guidelines for which vocal stems are publicly available.

In this work, we propose "global style tokens" (GSTs), a bank of embeddings that are jointly trained within Tacotron, a state-of-the-art end-to-end speech synthesis system. The embeddings are trained with no explicit labels, yet learn to model a large range of acoustic expressiveness. GSTs lead to a rich set of significant results. The soft interpretable "labels" they generate can be used to control synthesis in novel ways, such as varying speed and speaking style - independently of the text content. They can also be used for style transfer, replicating the speaking style of a single audio clip across an entire long-form text corpus. When trained on noisy, unlabeled found data, GSTs learn to factorize noise and speaker identity, providing a path towards highly scalable but robust speech synthesis.

Existing long-form video generation frameworks lack automated planning, requiring manual input for storylines, scenes, cinematography, and character interactions, resulting in high costs and inefficiencies. To address these challenges, we present MovieAgent, an automated movie generation via multi-agent Chain of Thought (CoT) planning. MovieAgent offers two key advantages: 1) We firstly explore and define the paradigm of automated movie/long-video generation. Given a script and character bank, our MovieAgent can generates multi-scene, multi-shot long-form videos with a coherent narrative, while ensuring character consistency, synchronized subtitles, and stable audio throughout the film. 2) MovieAgent introduces a hierarchical CoT-based reasoning process to automatically structure scenes, camera settings, and cinematography, significantly reducing human effort. By employing multiple LLM agents to simulate the roles of a director, screenwriter, storyboard artist, and location manager, MovieAgent streamlines the production pipeline. Experiments demonstrate that MovieAgent achieves new state-of-the-art results in script faithfulness, character consistency, and narrative coherence. Our hierarchical framework takes a step forward and provides new insights into fully automated movie generation. The code and project website are available at: https://github.com/showlab/MovieAgent and https://weijiawu.github.io/MovieAgent.

Multi-modal deep learning techniques for matching free-form text with music have shown promising results in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Prior work is often based on large proprietary data while publicly available datasets are few and small in size. In this study, we present WikiMuTe, a new and open dataset containing rich semantic descriptions of music. The data is sourced from Wikipedia's rich catalogue of articles covering musical works. Using a dedicated text-mining pipeline, we extract both long and short-form descriptions covering a wide range of topics related to music content such as genre, style, mood, instrumentation, and tempo. To show the use of this data, we train a model that jointly learns text and audio representations and performs cross-modal retrieval. The model is evaluated on two tasks: tag-based music retrieval and music auto-tagging. The results show that while our approach has state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks, but still observe a difference in performance depending on the data used for training.

We propose a self-supervised algorithm to learn representations from egocentric video data. Recently, significant efforts have been made to capture humans interacting with their own environments as they go about their daily activities. In result, several large egocentric datasets of interaction-rich multi-modal data have emerged. However, learning representations from videos can be challenging. First, given the uncurated nature of long-form continuous videos, learning effective representations require focusing on moments in time when interactions take place. Second, visual representations of daily activities should be sensitive to changes in the state of the environment. However, current successful multi-modal learning frameworks encourage representation invariance over time. To address these challenges, we leverage audio signals to identify moments of likely interactions which are conducive to better learning. We also propose a novel self-supervised objective that learns from audible state changes caused by interactions. We validate these contributions extensively on two large-scale egocentric datasets, EPIC-Kitchens-100 and the recently released Ego4D, and show improvements on several downstream tasks, including action recognition, long-term action anticipation, and object state change classification.

Under a unified operational definition, we define LLM memory as a persistent state written during pretraining, finetuning, or inference that can later be addressed and that stably influences outputs. We propose a four-part taxonomy (parametric, contextual, external, procedural/episodic) and a memory quadruple (location, persistence, write/access path, controllability). We link mechanism, evaluation, and governance via the chain write -> read -> inhibit/update. To avoid distorted comparisons across heterogeneous setups, we adopt a three-setting protocol (parametric only, offline retrieval, online retrieval) that decouples capability from information availability on the same data and timeline. On this basis we build a layered evaluation: parametric (closed-book recall, edit differential, memorization/privacy), contextual (position curves and the mid-sequence drop), external (answer correctness vs snippet attribution/faithfulness), and procedural/episodic (cross-session consistency and timeline replay, E MARS+). The framework integrates temporal governance and leakage auditing (freshness hits, outdated answers, refusal slices) and uncertainty reporting via inter-rater agreement plus paired tests with multiple-comparison correction. For updating and forgetting, we present DMM Gov: coordinating DAPT/TAPT, PEFT, model editing (ROME, MEND, MEMIT, SERAC), and RAG to form an auditable loop covering admission thresholds, rollout, monitoring, rollback, and change audits, with specs for timeliness, conflict handling, and long-horizon consistency. Finally, we give four testable propositions: minimum identifiability; a minimal evaluation card; causally constrained editing with verifiable forgetting; and when retrieval with small-window replay outperforms ultra-long-context reading. This yields a reproducible, comparable, and governable coordinate system for research and deployment.