VIBE: Video Instruction-aligned Background music gEneration

Aryan Vijay Bhosale, Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Vishnu Raj, Gouthaman KV, Sreyan Ghosh, Ramani Duraiswami, Lie Lu, Dinesh Manocha


Abstract
Current video-to-music (V2M) models lack semantic control and fail to penalize instruction violations, largely due to their reliance on reconstruction objectives and the representational bottleneck of static cross-modal conditioning in Diffusion Autoregressive (DAR) architectures. To resolve this, we introduce VIBE, a novel text-and-video-to-music (T+V2M) generation model that leverages: (1) Conditioning Connection, a depth-wise cross-layer conditioning mechanism that dynamically bridges the planning and diffusion refinement heads and (2) a comprehensive reward modeling taxonomy, optimizing for both hard, verifiable constraints (e.g., tempo, key) and soft, subjective qualities (e.g., musicality, multimodal alignment) with a structured 5-stage training curriculum. Upon evaluation using audio-visual alignment, instruction following, and audio quality metrics, along with a subjective human evaluation study, we observe that VIBE demonstrates enhanced controllability and instruction adherence while performing comparably to most evaluated baselines on generation fidelity and multimodal alignment.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.877
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18519–18534
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.877/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aryan Vijay Bhosale, Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Vishnu Raj, Gouthaman KV, Sreyan Ghosh, Ramani Duraiswami, Lie Lu, and Dinesh Manocha. 2026. VIBE: Video Instruction-aligned Background music gEneration. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 18519–18534, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VIBE: Video Instruction-aligned Background music gEneration (Bhosale et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.877.pdf