Papers for

podcast producers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

MixAgent automates music post-production using audio examples and critiques

Agentic Music Post-Production

Abstract: We introduce MixAgent, an agentic pipeline for music post-production that follows the workflow of audio engineers to build interpretable and editable mixing plans guided by a reference song. A grouping agent first routes related input tracks, such as drum recordings, into subgroups. A planning agent then uses retrieved examples to choose and order audio effects, such as volume control and reverb, for tracks, subgroups, and the full mix. To refine the mix, a detector identifies what needs correction, and a critic proposes numerical parameter adjustments from tracks to the full mix. In our experiments, prompting recent multimodal models to listen and revise often worsens the mix, making reliable correction a central challenge. We therefore build MixCritic, a dataset of 45,657 repair critiques derived from parameters fitted to professional mixes, and train the critic with supervised fine-tuning followed by preference optimization on rendered audio outcomes. On MedleyDB, learned refinement reduces error by 19% relative to the initial mix, with preference optimization reducing it by 8.4% over supervised training alone. Retrieved examples further improve effects selection, and a human listening test shows that MixAgent gets higher quality ratings than mixes produced by Qwen3-Omni, Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT-4o-audio.

Wed 21 OctSoundArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Mixing music after recording is hard because it involves many steps and decisions to get the sound just right. The authors created MixAgent, a tool that mimics how audio engineers work by grouping tracks, choosing effects, and fixing issues based on examples and feedback. They found that simply asking AI models to improve mixes often made them worse, so they made a special dataset and trained a system called MixCritic to better suggest corrections. In tests, MixAgent improved music mixes and was rated better than mixes made by other AI models.
Open → 2610.29093v1

CrossEdit enables flexible editing across images audio and video

CrossEdit: Cross-Modal Training Enables Rich Audio-Visual Editing

Abstract: Multimedia editing requires generative models to interpret complex, compositional instructions and modify only the desired elements across modalities, a capability largely beyond existing systems. Current approaches are typically limited to simple, single-attribute edits within one modality, since diverse, high-quality editing pairs are hard to obtain, especially for cross-modal tasks where aligned audiovisual (AV) data is scarce. We present CrossEdit, a unified omni-modal editing model for images, audio, and video that performs AV movie scene edits zero-shot through cross-modal transfer. Our key observation is that complex instruction-following, once learned in any modality, generalizes to others. We exploit the additive nature of acoustic signals to procedurally generate large-scale audio editing pairs with compositional instructions, and show that fine-tuning on this synthetic data and self-supervised AV masked reconstruction, alongside a targeted set of curated cross-modal tasks, induces instruction-following that transfers zero-shot to unseen modality and instruction combinations. To evaluate this capability, we release CrossEditBench, a human-annotated benchmark of AV edits on movie scenes, and propose AV-FES, a metric that jointly scores instruction following and consistency. We show that our proposed techniques improve performance on zero-shot AV movie scene editing, while maintaining or improving performance on lip-synced speech editing and standard image, video, and audio editing benchmarks. Demos are available at https://wanchichen.github.io/crossedit/.

Wed 7 OctSound
The gist
Editing multimedia content like pictures, sound, and video often requires changing only certain parts based on detailed instructions. Existing tools usually handle simple changes in just one type of content and struggle when sound and visuals must be edited together. The authors created CrossEdit, a single model trained to follow complex instructions and make edits across images, audio, and video without needing direct examples in every case. They used clever techniques to generate training data and showed that the model can apply what it learned from one type of media to others, improving editing quality on movies and other benchmarks.
Open → 2610.10264v1

Hybrid retrieval boosts accuracy in analyzing long audio recordings

HARP: Agentic Hybrid Retrieval and Analysis for Long-Form Audio

Abstract: Long-form audio analysis requires systems to localize and integrate evidence distributed across extended recordings. While existing work primarily retrieves semantic content through structured textual representations, many real-world queries depend on acoustic evidence that is better preserved in continuous representations or raw audio. We introduce HARP (Hybrid Audio Retrieval Pipeline), an agentic framework and benchmark for systematically studying retrieval and evidence representations in long-audio analysis. Hybrid retrieval combining keyword and vector search shows the most robust performance. When paired with both metadata and retrieved audio as evidence, average answer accuracy improves by around 10% and rationale accuracy by around 6% over single-modality retrieval and evidence. Fine-grained evaluation shows that answer accuracy alone overestimates system capability and that HARP mostly follows human performance trends across query types. These results highlight the importance of combining structured retrieval with flexible access to audio evidence and evaluating long-audio systems beyond answer accuracy.

Sat 12 SeptSound
The gist
Long audio recordings can be tricky to analyze because important information is spread out and sometimes found in sounds rather than just words. The authors created HARP, a system that combines searching with keywords and sound features to find evidence in audio more effectively. Their system performs better by using both text and audio clues, improving answer accuracy by about 10%. They also show that just looking at right answers isn't enough to judge performance—the reasoning behind answers matters too.
Open → 2609.14116v1

Open source speech model handles talking and editing by instructions

AuK Technical Report: An Open-Source Foundational Model for Speech Generation and Editing

Abstract: We introduce AuK, an open-source foundational model that unifies speech generation and editing through a common interface of natural-language instructions and audio context. To support this broad capability set, we construct approximately 3.03 billion instruction--audio instances and 1.95 million hours of effective supervision across five task families: speech generation, content editing, enhancement and separation, paralinguistic editing, and acoustic editing. AuK combines a multimodal large language model for semantic conditioning, an VAE jointly trained on speech, general audio, and music for acoustic conditioning, and a hybrid rectified-flow Transformer that performs dual-stream MMDiT blocks followed by unified single-stream DiT blocks for generation. Training begins with generation-only warm-up and proceeds to joint generation--editing pre-training. We then apply complementary post-training strategies: human-feedback preference optimization for open-ended editing and reward-based reinforcement learning for speech generation. To reduce inference cost, we further distill the model with consistency initialization and task-routed Decoupled DMD. The resulting AuK-Flash performs 4-step inference without classifier-free guidance and achieves a 4.5 wall-clock speedup over the full model under matched conditions. Experiments demonstrate leading performance on zero-shot and instruction-controlled speech generation and general instruction-guided editing, while remaining competitive on signal-level restoration tasks. We release both the source code and model weights to support reproducibility and further research.

Tue 8 SeptSoundComputation and LanguageMultimedia
The gist
Speech technology usually separates creating voices from editing them, but this work combines both in one model that listens to natural language instructions and audio examples. The authors built a huge training set covering many speech tasks and designed a model that mixes understanding meaning and sound together. They also use tricks like human feedback and distillation to make the model faster and better. The final open-source model performs well at generating new speech and editing existing clips just by following spoken or written directions.
Open → 2609.08936v1