Paper Detail

VA-Judger: Reward Modeling from Human Preference Feedback for Joint Video-Audio Generation

Yinming Huang, Shuyuan Tu, Xi Yan, Zihan Yang, Jianhua Han, Xu Hang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Zuxuan Wu

huggingface Score 9.0

Published 2026-08-19 · First seen 2026-08-21

General AI

Abstract

Using reinforcement learning to post-train joint video-audio generation models requires a reward signal. Existing methods construct this reward by combining metrics for individual quality dimensions, including audio quality, visual fidelity, and synchronization. However, these metrics evaluate perceptual dimensions separately and fail to capture the overall semantic and temporal coherence among the text prompt, video, and audio that shapes human preferences. Optimizing models against these metrics encourages reward hacking, generating video-audio content that achieves high scores on these metrics yet appears incoherent or unfaithful to human viewers. To address this problem, we first construct a large-scale human-preference dataset VAPref-10K for joint video-audio generation, comprising 9K prompts and 10.3K fine-grained paired comparisons from open-source generation models. We also introduce the VA-Judger-Bench benchmark with both in-domain and out-of-domain model comparisons to evaluate whether reward models truly align with human preferences. We further propose VA-Judger, a chain-of-thought omni-reward model for joint video-audio generation. In particular, VA-Judger first learns from pairs with clear quality gaps to establish structured output and coarse preference discrimination, then distills reliable preference explanations for harder near-quality comparisons via rejection sampling verified against human annotations, and finally performs dimension-wise reinforcement learning that decomposes human feedback into individual quality dimensions for denser reward signals than a single binary preference label. Experiments show that VA-Judger outperforms metric baselines in predicting human preferences on both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations. Using its human-aligned rewards for post-training audio-video generation model also yields significant improvements in generation quality.

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BibTeX

@misc{huang2026va,
  title = {VA-Judger: Reward Modeling from Human Preference Feedback for Joint Video-Audio Generation},
  author = {Yinming Huang and Shuyuan Tu and Xi Yan and Zihan Yang and Jianhua Han and Xu Hang and Yu-Gang Jiang and Zuxuan Wu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Using reinforcement learning to post-train joint video-audio generation models requires a reward signal. Existing methods construct this reward by combining metrics for individual quality dimensions, including audio quality, visual fidelity, and synchronization. However, these metrics evaluate perceptual dimensions separately and fail to capture the overall semantic and temporal coherence among the text prompt, video, and audio that shapes human preferences. Optimizing models against these metri},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2608.18607},
  keywords = {reinforcement learning, joint video-audio generation, reward hacking, human-preference dataset, VAPref-10K, VA-Judger-Bench, VA-Judger, chain-of-thought, omni-reward model, rejection sampling, dimension-wise reinforcement learning, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2608.18607},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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