SyncReward: Human-Aligned Synchronization Reward for Audio-Visual Generation

Kaisi Guan, Ying Ba, Wenjing Wang, Xihua Wang, Chen Li +2

Recent years have witnessed rapid progress in joint audio--visual generation. However, audio--visual synchronization remains a challenge, as generated speech and sound often temporally misalign with visual events. A key bottleneck is the lack of human-annotated data, reliable evaluation benchmarks, and synchronization-aware evaluation models for generated audio--visual outputs. To address these limitations, we conduct a comprehensive study spanning data, benchmarking, and reward modeling. We first introduce SyncReward-Data-80K, a dataset containing 80K professional synchronization ratings for clips from eight audio--visual generators. A taxonomy-guided construction pipeline covers four sound-event families: Speech, Onset, Instrument, and Ambient. We further construct \textbf{SyncReward-Bench}, a held-out benchmark of 1K clips, each independently rated by multiple professionals. Using this benchmark, we systematically evaluate specialized synchronization metrics and omni-modal models, revealing their substantial misalignment with human judgments. Finally, we develop SyncReward, a reward model that combines semantic--temporal contrastive pretraining on real clips with human…