Self-Representation Alignment in Diffusion Models for Video Background Music Generation

Diffusion models have been widely used for various generative tasks. However, recent studies have demonstrated that the internal representations learned in the diffusion models' denoising process are insufficiently meaningful, which can hinder the generation performance. To address this, we propose a novel diffusion U-Net architecture enhanced by explicitly aligning the weaker representation from the earlier layer conditioned on higher noise with the better representation from the later layer conditioned on lower noise during training, which we use for the challenging multimodal task of video background music generation. Our diffusion U-Net Self-Representation Alignment (U-SRA) employs an alignment loss to effectively guide our diffusion model to learn good internal representations, thereby enabling it to produce higher-quality symbolic music conditioned on video features. We employ a cross-attention mechanism to synchronize music with video segments. Experiments on a benchmark video-music dataset demonstrate that the proposed U-SRA approach for video background music generation surpasses the state-of-the-art across key evaluation metrics, including video-music alignment and overall music quality.