Audio-Omni: Extending Multi-modal Understanding to Versatile Audio Generation and Editing

TL;DR

Audio-Omni is a comprehensive framework that unifies audio understanding, generation, and editing across multiple domains using multimodal reasoning and high-fidelity synthesis, supported by a large-scale dataset.

Contribution

It introduces the first end-to-end unified model for versatile audio tasks across sound, music, and speech, combining a multimodal LLM and a diffusion transformer.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks.

Outperforms prior unified approaches and matches specialized models.

Demonstrates advanced capabilities like zero-shot cross-lingual control.

Abstract

Recent progress in multimodal models has spurred rapid advances in audio understanding, generation, and editing. However, these capabilities are typically addressed by specialized models, leaving the development of a truly unified framework that can seamlessly integrate all three tasks underexplored. While some pioneering works have explored unifying audio understanding and generation, they often remain confined to specific domains. To address this, we introduce Audio-Omni, the first end-to-end framework to unify generation and editing across general sound, music, and speech domains, with integrated multi-modal understanding capabilities. Our architecture synergizes a frozen Multimodal Large Language Model for high-level reasoning with a trainable Diffusion Transformer for high-fidelity synthesis. To overcome the critical data scarcity in audio editing, we construct AudioEdit, a new large-scale dataset comprising over one million meticulously curated editing pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Audio-Omni achieves state-of-the-art performance across a suite of benchmarks, outperforming prior unified approaches while achieving performance on par with or superior to specialized expert models. Beyond its core capabilities, Audio-Omni exhibits remarkable inherited capabilities, including knowledge-augmented reasoning generation, in-context generation, and zero-shot cross-lingual control for audio generation, highlighting a promising direction toward universal generative audio intelligence. The code, model, and dataset will be publicly released on https://zeyuet.github.io/Audio-Omni.