# Unison: Harmonizing Motion, Speech, and Sound for Human-Centric Audio-Video Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08729 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08729/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03233/) (2026)
- [Rolling Forcing: Autoregressive Long Video Diffusion in Real Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25161/) (2025)
- [MM-Diffusion: Learning Multi-Modal Diffusion Models for Joint Audio and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09478/) (2022)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [MMAudio: Taming Multimodal Joint Training for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15322/) (2024)
- [VidProM: A Million-scale Real Prompt-Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06098/) (2024)
- [Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15821/) (2023)
- [CelebV-Text: A Large-Scale Facial Text-Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14717/) (2023)
- [Synchformer: Efficient Synchronization from Sparse Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16423/) (2024)
- [JavisDiT: Joint Audio-Video Diffusion Transformer with Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Prior Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23377/) (2025)
- [Ovi: Twin Backbone Cross-Modal Fusion for Audio-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01284/) (2025)
- [Zipformer: A faster and better encoder for automatic speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11230/) (2023)
- [OpenHumanVid: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Enhancing Human-Centric Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00115/) (2024)
- [YuE: Scaling Open Foundation Models for Long-Form Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08638/) (2025)
- [UniVerse-1: Unified Audio-Video Generation via Stitching of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06155/) (2025)
- [AI Flow: Perspectives, Scenarios, and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12479/) (2025)
- [MOVA: Towards Scalable and Synchronized Video-Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08794/) (2026)
- [VidMuse: A Simple Video-to-Music Generation Framework with Long-Short-Term Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04321/) (2024)
- [Positive-incentive Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09541/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [InteractiveAvatar: Real-Time Streaming Video Generation for Consistent and Intent-Aware Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22905/) (2026)
- [DART: Difficulty-Adaptive Routing for Zero-Shot Video Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00672/) (2026)
- [StreamTalk: Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Key-Pose Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01643/) (2026)
- [Towards Expressive and Faithful Audio-to-Image Generation: A Unified Multimodal Dataset and Synthesis Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09529/) (2026)
- [DreamX-Creator: Democratizing Native Audio-Video Generation at 2K Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31106/) (2026)
- [TimeSteer: Inference-Time Speech Scheduling in Joint Audio-Visual Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01277/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Motion, speech, and sound effects are fundamental elements of human-centric videos, yet their heterogeneous temporal characteristics make joint generation highly challenging. Existing audio-video generation models often fail to maintain consistent alignment across these modalities, leading to noticeable mismatches between motion, speech, and environmental sounds. We present Unison, a unified framework that explicitly promotes coherence across the motion, speech, and sound modalities. Within the audio stream, Unison employs a semantic-guided harmonization strategy that decouples the generation of speech and sound-effect components. Leveraging bidirectional audio cross-attention and semantic-conditioned gating for semantic-driven adaptive recomposition, this approach effectively mitigates speech dominance and enhances acoustic clarity. For audio-motion synchronization, we propose a bidirectional cross-modal forcing strategy where the cleaner modality guides the noisier one through decoupled denoising schedules, reinforced by a progressive stabilization strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Unison achieves state-of-the-art performance in both audio perceptual quality and cross-modal synchronization, highlighting the importance of explicit multimodal harmonization in human-centric video generation.