Generating sound effects for videos often requires creating artistic sound effects that diverge significantly from real-life sources and flexible control in the sound design. To address this problem, we introduce MultiFoley, a model designed for video-guided sound generation that supports multimodal conditioning through text, audio, and video. Given a silent video and a text prompt, MultiFoley allows users to create clean sounds (e.g., skateboard wheels spinning without wind noise) or more whimsical sounds (e.g., making a lion’s roar sound like a cat’s meow). MultiFoley also allows users to choose reference audio from sound effects (SFX) libraries or partial videos for conditioning. A key novelty of our model lies in its joint training on both internet video datasets with low-quality audio and professional SFX recordings, enabling high-quality, full-bandwidth (48kHz) audio generation. Through automated evaluations and human studies, we demonstrate that MultiFoley successfully generates synchronized high-quality sounds across varied conditional inputs and outperforms existing methods. Please see our project page for video results: https://ificl.github.io/MultiFoley/

We present a novel perspective on learning video embedders for generative modeling: rather than requiring an exact reproduction of an input video, an effective embedder should focus on synthesizing visually plausible reconstructions. This relaxed criterion enables substantial improvements in compression ratios without compromising the quality of downstream generative models. Specifically, we propose replacing the conventional encoder-decoder video embedder with an encoder-generator framework that employs a diffusion transformer (DiT) to synthesize missing details from a compact latent space. Therein, we develop a dedicated latent conditioning module to condition the DiT decoder on the encoded video latent embedding. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach enables superior encoding-decoding performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly as the compression ratio increases. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we report results from our video embedders achieving a temporal compression ratio of up to 32x (8x higher than leading video embedders) and validate the robustness of this ultra-compact latent space for text-to-video generation, providing a significant efficiency boost in latent diffusion model training and inference.

Human decision-making underlies all economic behavior. For the past four decades, human decision-making under uncertainty has continued to be explained by theoretical models based on prospect theory, a framework that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. However, theoretical models of this kind have developed slowly, and robust, high-precision predictive models of human decisions remain a challenge. While machine learning is a natural candidate for solving these problems, it is currently unclear to what extent it can improve predictions obtained by current theories. We argue that this is mainly due to data scarcity, since noisy human behavior requires massive sample sizes to be accurately captured by off-the-shelf machine learning methods. To solve this problem, what is needed are machine learning models with appropriate inductive biases for capturing human behavior, and larger datasets. We offer two contributions towards this end: first, we construct “cognitive model priors” by pretraining neural networks with synthetic data generated by cognitive models (i.e., theoretical models developed by cognitive psychologists). We find that fine-tuning these networks on small datasets of real human decisions results in unprecedented state-of-the-art improvements on two benchmark datasets. Second, we present the first large-scale dataset for human decision-making, containing over 240,000 human judgments across over 13,000 decision problems. This dataset reveals the circumstances where cognitive model priors are useful, and provides a new standard for benchmarking prediction of human decisions under uncertainty.