MosaicAudio

MosaicAudio: Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Controllable Video-to-Audio Generation
Anonymous EMNLP 2026 Submission

Abstract

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation aims to produce a single soundtrack that is simultaneously semantically faithful, temporally synchronized, aesthetically natural, and—for stereo output—spatially accurate. These perceptual axes are judged on the same waveform yet often pull generation in locally conflicting directions, while the dominant post-training recipe—reinforcement learning (RL) from an aggregated scalar reward—supervises them only at the final waveform with one entangled signal that gives little indication of which axis failed or where, so competing axes interfere through a single advantage value. We present MosaicAudio, a V2A framework that replaces terminal scalar rewards with dense, per-axis supervision distilled on-policy. MosaicAudio first trains four specialist flow-matching teachers, one per perceptual axis, then consolidates them into a single student: the student samples its own denoising trajectories and, at each visited state, receives a full teacher velocity field routed to one axis at a time, so that incompatible corrections are not averaged together. A perceptual manifold anchor keeps the student on a high-fidelity audio prior and curbs reward hacking during alignment. On the in-domain VGGSound test set and the out-of-domain AudioCanvas benchmark, MosaicAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance among compared V2A systems across objective metrics and human ratings, with especially consistent gains in complex multi-event scenes.

Method Overview

MosaicAudio framework overview
Figure 1. Overview of MosaicAudio, which replaces a terminal scalar reward with dense, per-axis, on-policy velocity supervision. (1) Decompose the soundscape into Semantic, Temporal, Aesthetic, and Spatial CoT blocks that condition the generator. (2) Specialize one flow-matching teacher per axis by single-reward alignment. (3) Consolidate the teachers into one student by multi-teacher on-policy distillation: at each visited denoising state the student receives a dense, axis-routed teacher velocity field as a velocity-KL reward, while a frozen perceptual anchor preserves fidelity; a balanced scheduler activates one axis (S / T / A / P) per mini-batch. Teachers and reward models are used only in post-training; at inference the student alone maps video and plan to stereo audio.

Comparisons with Baselines

Click any card to see full comparison across all systems.

Game Soundeffect

Playing Badminton

Playing Maraca

City Walk in the Rain

Playing Electric Guitar

Chinese Street Singing

Dog Eating

Playing Drum Kit

Baby Laughter

Car Driving Engine

People Giggling

Field Recording

Hand-held Start

Playing Double Bass

Playing Cello

Unlocking, Pouring

Footsteps in the Snow

Machining, Tapping

Plastic Pop Opening

Have Fun with Animal

Birds Singing


Main Results

Key metrics on VGGSound (in-domain) and AudioCanvas (out-of-domain). MosaicAudio w/o OPD is the shared decomposed-CoT cold start before any post-training. “—” marks a mono baseline without a stereo channel (CRW) or a method not evaluated on that benchmark. Ground truth (GT) is shown for reference only.

Method VGGSound (in-domain) AudioCanvas (out-of-domain)
CLAP ↑DeSync ↓CE ↑CRW ↓MOS-C ↑ CLAP ↑DeSync ↓CE ↑CRW ↓MOS-C ↑
Ground truth 0.460.554.404.65 0.480.404.024.72
Frieren 0.320.853.573.51
V2A-Mapper 0.311.234.123.44
AudioX 0.411.243.8619.253.65
HunyuanVideo-Foley 0.420.553.923.96 0.440.474.043.71
MMAudio 0.400.463.884.03 0.460.433.973.87
ThinkSound 0.430.553.9513.474.18 0.480.804.1022.823.80
PrismAudio 0.470.414.297.724.22 0.520.364.2612.874.01
MosaicAudio w/o OPD 0.420.513.9410.294.11 0.420.443.8115.303.85
MosaicAudio 0.500.384.647.114.25 0.550.354.3612.204.13

Bold blue marks the best result per column. The automatic proxies (CLAP, DeSync, Audiobox CE) are not calibrated upper bounds, so post-training can exceed GT on the metrics it directly optimizes.


Consistent Gains Across Axes

MosaicAudio consistent gains on AudioCanvas
Figure 2. Relative improvement of MosaicAudio over its cold start on AudioCanvas, by perceptual axis—semantic (CLAP), temporal (DeSync), aesthetic (CE), spatial (CRW). Each bar is the relative gain; for the DeSync and CRW error metrics it is the percentage reduction (so larger is better for all four). All four axes improve and none regresses—the intended behavior of multi-teacher on-policy distillation, which absorbs each specialist’s correction without inheriting any single specialist’s failure mode.