Audio-Synchronized Visual Animation

Current visual generation methods can produce high-quality videos guided by texts. However, effectively controlling object dynamics remains a challenge. This work explores audio as a cue to generate temporally-synchronized image animations. We introduce Audio-Synchronized Visual Animation (ASVA), a task animating a static image to demonstrate motion dynamics, temporally guided by audio clips across multiple classes. To this end, we present AVSync15, a dataset curated from VGGSound with videos featuring synchronized audio-visual events across 15 categories. We also present a diffusion model, AVSyncD, capable of generating dynamic animations guided by audios. Extensive evaluations validate AVSync15 as a reliable benchmark for synchronized generation and demonstrate our model's superior performance. We further explore AVSyncD's potential in a variety of audio-synchronized generation tasks, from generating full videos without a base image to controlling object motions with various sounds. We hope our established benchmark can open new avenues for controllable visual generation.