PhyAVBench: A Challenging Audio Physics-Sensitivity Benchmark for Physically Grounded Text-to-Audio-Video Generation

Text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation underpins a wide range of applications demanding realistic audio-visual content, including virtual reality, world modeling, gaming, and filmmaking. However, existing T2AV models remain incapable of generating physically plausible sounds, primarily due to their limited understanding of physical principles. To situate current research progress, we present PhyAVBench, a challenging audio physics-sensitivity benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the audio physics grounding capabilities of existing T2AV models. PhyAVBench comprises 1,000 groups of paired text prompts with controlled physical variables that implicitly induce sound variations, enabling a fine-grained assessment of models' sensitivity to changes in underlying acoustic conditions. We term this evaluation paradigm the Audio-Physics Sensitivity Test (APST). Unlike prior benchmarks that primarily focus on audio-video synchronization, PhyAVBench explicitly evaluates models' understanding of the physical mechanisms underlying sound generation, covering 6 major audio physics dimensions, 4 daily scenarios (music, sound effects, speech, and their mix), and 50 fine-grained test points, ranging from fundamental aspects such as sound diffraction to more complex phenomena, e.g., Helmholtz resonance. Each test point consists of multiple groups of paired prompts, where each prompt is grounded by at least 20 newly recorded or collected real-world videos, thereby minimizing the risk of data leakage during model pre-training. Both prompts and videos are iteratively refined through rigorous human-involved error correction and quality control to ensure high quality. We argue that only models with a genuine grasp of audio-related physical principles can generate physically consistent audio-visual content. We hope PhyAVBench will stimulate future progress in this critical yet largely unexplored domain.

Tempo as the Stable Cue: Hierarchical Mixture of Tempo and Beat Experts for Music to 3D Dance Generation

Music to 3D dance generation aims to synthesize realistic and rhythmically synchronized human dance from music. While existing methods often rely on additional genre labels to further improve dance generation, such labels are typically noisy, coarse, unavailable, or insufficient to capture the diversity of real-world music, which can result in rhythm misalignment or stylistic drift. In contrast, we observe that tempo, a core property reflecting musical rhythm and pace, remains relatively consistent across datasets and genres, typically ranging from 60 to 200 BPM. Based on this finding, we propose TempoMoE, a hierarchical tempo-aware Mixture-of-Experts module that enhances the diffusion model and its rhythm perception. TempoMoE organizes motion experts into tempo-structured groups for different tempo ranges, with multi-scale beat experts capturing fine- and long-range rhythmic dynamics. A Hierarchical Rhythm-Adaptive Routing dynamically selects and fuses experts from music features, enabling flexible, rhythm-aligned generation without manual genre labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TempoMoE achieves state-of-the-art results in dance quality and rhythm alignment.

UniAct: Unified Motion Generation and Action Streaming for Humanoid Robots

A long-standing objective in humanoid robotics is the realization of versatile agents capable of following diverse multimodal instructions with human-level flexibility. Despite advances in humanoid control, bridging high-level multimodal perception with whole-body execution remains a significant bottleneck. Existing methods often struggle to translate heterogeneous instructions -- such as language, music, and trajectories -- into stable, real-time actions. Here we show that UniAct, a two-stage framework integrating a fine-tuned MLLM with a causal streaming pipeline, enables humanoid robots to execute multimodal instructions with sub-500 ms latency. By unifying inputs through a shared discrete codebook via FSQ, UniAct ensures cross-modal alignment while constraining motions to a physically grounded manifold. This approach yields a 19% improvement in the success rate of zero-shot tracking of imperfect reference motions. We validate UniAct on UniMoCap, our 20-hour humanoid motion benchmark, demonstrating robust generalization across diverse real-world scenarios. Our results mark a critical step toward responsive, general-purpose humanoid assistants capable of seamless interaction through unified perception and control.

MACE-Dance: Motion-Appearance Cascaded Experts for Music-Driven Dance Video Generation

With the rise of online dance-video platforms and rapid advances in AI-generated content (AIGC), music-driven dance generation has emerged as a compelling research direction. Despite substantial progress in related domains such as music-driven 3D dance generation, pose-driven image animation, and audio-driven talking-head synthesis, existing methods cannot be directly adapted to this task. Moreover, the limited studies in this area still struggle to jointly achieve high-quality visual appearance and realistic human motion. Accordingly, we present MACE-Dance, a music-driven dance video generation framework with cascaded Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). The Motion Expert performs music-to-3D motion generation while enforcing kinematic plausibility and artistic expressiveness, whereas the Appearance Expert carries out motion- and reference-conditioned video synthesis, preserving visual identity with spatiotemporal coherence. Specifically, the Motion Expert adopts a diffusion model with a BiMamba-Transformer hybrid architecture and a Guidance-Free Training (GFT) strategy, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 3D dance generation. The Appearance Expert employs a decoupled kinematic-aesthetic fine-tuning strategy, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in pose-driven image animation. To better benchmark this task, we curate a large-scale and diverse dataset and design a motion-appearance evaluation protocol. Based on this protocol, MACE-Dance also achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://macedance.github.io/

Bridging the Copyright Gap: Do Large Vision-Language Models Recognize and Respect Copyrighted Content?

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in multimodal reasoning tasks. However, their widespread accessibility raises critical concerns about potential copyright infringement. Will LVLMs accurately recognize and comply with copyright regulations when encountering copyrighted content (i.e., user input, retrieved documents) in the context? Failure to comply with copyright regulations may lead to serious legal and ethical consequences, particularly when LVLMs generate responses based on copyrighted materials (e.g., retrieved book experts, news reports). In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of various LVLMs, examining how they handle copyrighted content -- such as book excerpts, news articles, music lyrics, and code documentation when they are presented as visual inputs. To systematically measure copyright compliance, we introduce a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 50,000 multimodal query-content pairs designed to evaluate how effectively LVLMs handle queries that could lead to copyright infringement. Given that real-world copyrighted content may or may not include a copyright notice, the dataset includes query-content pairs in two distinct scenarios: with and without a copyright notice. For the former, we extensively cover four types of copyright notices to account for different cases. Our evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art closed-source LVLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in recognizing and respecting the copyrighted content, even when presented with the copyright notice. To solve this limitation, we introduce a novel tool-augmented defense framework for copyright compliance, which reduces infringement risks in all scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of developing copyright-aware LVLMs to ensure the responsible and lawful use of copyrighted content.

MuseCPBench: an Empirical Study of Music Editing Methods through Music Context Preservation

Music editing plays a vital role in modern music production, with applications in film, broadcasting, and game development. Recent advances in music generation models have enabled diverse editing tasks such as timbre transfer, instrument substitution, and genre transformation. However, many existing works overlook the evaluation of their ability to preserve musical facets that should remain unchanged during editing a property we define as Music Context Preservation (MCP). While some studies do consider MCP, they adopt inconsistent evaluation protocols and metrics, leading to unreliable and unfair comparisons. To address this gap, we introduce the first MCP evaluation benchmark, MuseCPBench, which covers four categories of musical facets and enables comprehensive comparisons across five representative music editing baselines. Through systematic analysis along musical facets, methods, and models, we identify consistent preservation gaps in current music editing methods and provide insightful explanations. We hope our findings offer practical guidance for developing more effective and reliable music editing strategies with strong MCP capability

AutoMV: An Automatic Multi-Agent System for Music Video Generation

Music-to-Video (M2V) generation for full-length songs faces significant challenges. Existing methods produce short, disjointed clips, failing to align visuals with musical structure, beats, or lyrics, and lack temporal consistency. We propose AutoMV, a multi-agent system that generates full music videos (MVs) directly from a song. AutoMV first applies music processing tools to extract musical attributes, such as structure, vocal tracks, and time-aligned lyrics, and constructs these features as contextual inputs for following agents. The screenwriter Agent and director Agent then use this information to design short script, define character profiles in a shared external bank, and specify camera instructions. Subsequently, these agents call the image generator for keyframes and different video generators for "story" or "singer" scenes. A Verifier Agent evaluates their output, enabling multi-agent collaboration to produce a coherent longform MV. To evaluate M2V generation, we further propose a benchmark with four high-level categories (Music Content, Technical, Post-production, Art) and twelve ine-grained criteria. This benchmark was applied to compare commercial products, AutoMV, and human-directed MVs with expert human raters: AutoMV outperforms current baselines significantly across all four categories, narrowing the gap to professional MVs. Finally, we investigate using large multimodal models as automatic MV judges; while promising, they still lag behind human expert, highlighting room for future work.

Aliasing-Free Neural Audio Synthesis

Neural vocoders and codecs reconstruct waveforms from acoustic representations, which directly impact the audio quality. Among existing methods, upsampling-based time-domain models are superior in both inference speed and synthesis quality, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Still, despite their success in producing perceptually natural sound, their synthesis fidelity remains limited due to the aliasing artifacts brought by the inadequately designed model architectures. In particular, the unconstrained nonlinear activation generates an infinite number of harmonics that exceed the Nyquist frequency, resulting in ``folded-back'' aliasing artifacts. The widely used upsampling layer, ConvTranspose, copies the mirrored low-frequency parts to fill the empty high-frequency region, resulting in ``mirrored'' aliasing artifacts. Meanwhile, the combination of its inherent periodicity and the mirrored DC bias also brings ``tonal artifact,'' resulting in constant-frequency ringing. This paper aims to solve these issues from a signal processing perspective. Specifically, we apply oversampling and anti-derivative anti-aliasing to the activation function to obtain its anti-aliased form, and replace the problematic ConvTranspose layer with resampling to avoid the ``tonal artifact'' and eliminate aliased components. Based on our proposed anti-aliased modules, we introduce Pupu-Vocoder and Pupu-Codec, and release high-quality pre-trained checkpoints to facilitate audio generation research. We build a test signal benchmark to illustrate the effectiveness of the anti-aliased modules, and conduct experiments on speech, singing voice, music, and audio to validate our proposed models. Experimental results confirm that our lightweight Pupu-Vocoder and Pupu-Codec models can easily outperform existing systems on singing voice, music, and audio, while achieving comparable performance on speech.

Sound and Music Biases in Deep Music Transcription Models: A Systematic Analysis

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) -- the task of converting music audio into note representations -- has seen rapid progress, driven largely by deep learning systems. Due to the limited availability of richly annotated music datasets, much of the progress in AMT has been concentrated on classical piano music, and even a few very specific datasets. Whether these systems can generalize effectively to other musical contexts remains an open question. Complementing recent studies on distribution shifts in sound (e.g., recording conditions), in this work we investigate the musical dimension -- specifically, variations in genre, dynamics, and polyphony levels. To this end, we introduce the MDS corpus, comprising three distinct subsets -- (1) Genre, (2) Random, and (3) MAEtest -- to emulate different axes of distribution shift. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art AMT systems on the MDS corpus using both traditional information-retrieval and musically-informed performance metrics. Our extensive evaluation isolates and exposes varying degrees of performance degradation under specific distribution shifts. In particular, we measure a note-level F1 performance drop of 20 percentage points due to sound, and 14 due to genre. Generally, we find that dynamics estimation proves more vulnerable to musical variation than onset prediction. Musically informed evaluation metrics, particularly those capturing harmonic structure, help identify potential contributing factors. Furthermore, experiments with randomly generated, non-musical sequences reveal clear limitations in system performance under extreme musical distribution shifts. Altogether, these findings offer new evidence of the persistent impact of the Corpus Bias problem in deep AMT systems.

Reframing Music-Driven 2D Dance Pose Generation as Multi-Channel Image Generation

Recent pose-to-video models can translate 2D pose sequences into photorealistic, identity-preserving dance videos, so the key challenge is to generate temporally coherent, rhythm-aligned 2D poses from music, especially under complex, high-variance in-the-wild distributions. We address this by reframing music-to-dance generation as a music-token-conditioned multi-channel image synthesis problem: 2D pose sequences are encoded as one-hot images, compressed by a pretrained image VAE, and modeled with a DiT-style backbone, allowing us to inherit architectural and training advances from modern text-to-image models and better capture high-variance 2D pose distributions. On top of this formulation, we introduce (i) a time-shared temporal indexing scheme that explicitly synchronizes music tokens and pose latents over time and (ii) a reference-pose conditioning strategy that preserves subject-specific body proportions and on-screen scale while enabling long-horizon segment-and-stitch generation. Experiments on a large in-the-wild 2D dance corpus and the calibrated AIST++2D benchmark show consistent improvements over representative music-to-dance methods in pose- and video-space metrics and human preference, and ablations validate the contributions of the representation, temporal indexing, and reference conditioning. See supplementary videos at https://hot-dance.github.io