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Zachary Novack

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Preprint Aug 2026

Equilibrium Forcing: Adaptive Video Generation Without Noise Conditioning

Standard autoregressive video generation algorithms based on Diffusion and Flow Matching rely on rigid training objectives and static sampling schedules, limiting inference procedures from adapting to the data. We introduce Equilibrium Forcing (EqF), a simplified framework for video denoising generative models without noise level conditioning. EqF pioneers modular training- and inference-time designs for noise-unconditional generation that decouple learning the denoising field from sampling. This flexibility allows for inference-time algorithms that operate in a closed loop by adapting to feedback from the sample, improving video quality and consistency on challenging autoregressive video generation benchmarks. Extensive analysis elucidates exactly how removing the noise level conditioning enables EqF's data-dependent inference properties to surpass the performance of standard noise level-conditional denoising video methods.

H. Lillemark, Alex Rojas, Zachary Novack et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Dialogue-Aware Video-to-Music Generation Using Public Domain Film Collections

Video-to-music generation has drawn growing interest for its role in conveying the emotion of visual media, including film. Progress in the field, however, is hampered by a reproducibility gap: models are often trained on crawled corpora referenced through YouTube URLs that may be deleted, with the underlying data often difficult and time-consuming to retrieve. To address this, we introduce the Open Screen Soundtrack Library version 2 (OSSL-v2), a self-hosted corpus of 34,343 video clips totaling 246.4 hours, sourced from public-domain films. Unlike crawled corpora, OSSL-v2 is reproducible (i.e., not subject to link rot) and copyright-conscious, yet still large enough to train functional video-to-music models. We then use this film-domain corpus to study dialogue as a conditioning signal for video-to-music generation, motivated by the close temporal coupling between film music and on-screen speech. Specifically, we augment existing models'video cross-attention with a time axis and modulate it frame-by-frame with the dialogue track. Evaluated on both public-domain and commercial films, our approach shows improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/McAuley-Lab/OSSL-v2.

Haven Kim, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Dec 2025

Evaluating Music Context Preservation: A Multi-facet Framework for Music Editing Systems

The first MuseCP evaluation framework is introduced that covers four categories of music facets with fine-grained and well-tailored metrics to capture nuanced changes in music attributes and hopes it can offer practical guidance for developing more effective and reliable music editing strategies with strong MuseCP capability.

Yash Vishe, Eric Xue, Xunyi Jiang et al. · 1 citation

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