# FoleyDirector: Fine-Grained Temporal Steering for Video-to-Audio Generation via Structured Scripts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19857 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19857/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Simple and Controllable Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05284/) (2023)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12661/) (2023)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [CosyVoice 2: Scalable Streaming Speech Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10117/) (2024)
- [Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09983/) (2022)
- [OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18871/) (2025)
- [Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20427/) (2025)
- [Efficient Training of Audio Transformers with Patchout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05069/) (2021)
- [CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17589/) (2025)
- [Text-to-Audio Generation using Instruction-Tuned LLM and Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13731/) (2023)
- [Diff-Foley: Synchronized Video-to-Audio Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17203/) (2023)
- [MMAudio: Taming Multimodal Joint Training for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15322/) (2024)
- [MIGC: Multi-Instance Generation Controller for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05408/) (2024)
- [FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01494/) (2024)
- [Synchformer: Efficient Synchronization from Sparse Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16423/) (2024)
- [Vista-LLaMA: Reducing Hallucination in Video Language Models via Equal Distance to Visual Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08870/) (2023)
- [TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21037/) (2024)
- [Frieren: Efficient Video-to-Audio Generation Network with Rectified Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00320/) (2024)
- [Temporally Aligned Audio for Video with Autoregression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13689/) (2024)
- [Masked Audio Generation using a Single Non-Autoregressive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04577/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RefineAnything: Multimodal Region-Specific Refinement for Perfect Local Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06870/) (2026)
- [Soundwich: Video Generation with Layered and Controllable Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00691/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent Video-to-Audio (V2A) methods have achieved remarkable progress, enabling the synthesis of realistic, high-quality audio. However, they struggle with fine-grained temporal control in multi-event scenarios or when visual cues are insufficient, such as small regions, off-screen sounds, or occluded or partially visible objects. In this paper, we propose FoleyDirector, a framework that, for the first time, enables precise temporal guidance in DiT-based V2A generation while preserving the base model's audio quality and allowing seamless switching between V2A generation and temporally controlled synthesis. FoleyDirector introduces Structured Temporal Scripts (STS), a set of captions corresponding to short temporal segments, to provide richer temporal information. These features are integrated via the Script-Guided Temporal Fusion Module, which employs Temporal Script Attention to fuse STS features coherently. To handle complex multi-event scenarios, we further propose Bi-Frame Sound Synthesis, enabling parallel in-frame and out-of-frame audio generation and improving controllability. To support training and evaluation, we construct the DirectorSound dataset and introduce VGGSoundDirector and DirectorBench. Experiments demonstrate that FoleyDirector substantially enhances temporal controllability while maintaining high audio fidelity, empowering users to act as Foley directors and advancing V2A toward more expressive and controllable generation.