[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-85773-en":3,"doc-seo-85773-105":29,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":91},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":27,"read_time":28},85773,2336464648322,"Aria","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/2200025388227c56fec?_k=1778556882303663488",8,"Research & Report","A Production-Oriented Framework for Evaluation of SFX Generation","Industrial sound design demands audio generation systems that produce realistic SFX while preserving the perceptual identity of a reference, enabling controllable variation, and maintaining workflow efficiency. Existing evaluations are often bound to text-to-audio, unconditional generation, or narrowly defined tasks, reducing insight for reference-guided SFX variation. The paper proposes a production-oriented evaluation framework with nine requirements and model-capability awareness, using a two-stage protocol plus objective metrics and a human perceptual study.","Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx26), Cambridge, MA, USA, 1 –4 September 2026  \nA PRODUCTION-ORIENTED FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATION OF SFX GENERATION  \nMélodie Desbos ∗ , Yara Bahram, Eric Granger, Mohammadhadi Shateri  \nLIVIA, Dept. of Systems Engineering, ETS Montréal, Canada  \n[melodie.desbos@livia.etsmtl.ca](melodie.desbos@livia.etsmtl.ca)  \narXiv :2607 .09973v 1 [ cs . SD] 10 Jul 2026  \nABSTRACT  \nIndustrial sound design requires audio generation systems that not only produce realistic audio, but also preserve the perceptual identity of a reference, support controllable variation, and remain efficient for practical workflows. Existing evaluations are usually tied to text-to-audio (TTA), unconditional, or task-specific settings, limiting assessment for reference-guided sound effects (SFX) variation. To address this gap, we present a production-oriented evaluation framework for structured comparison of heterogeneous audio generation and editing methods. Our framework identifies nine production requirements and explicitly accounts for differences in model capabilities, enabling comparison under a common production objective. A two-stage protocol is introduced: (1) a referenceguided audio-to-audio (ATA) variation task, in which all methods are evaluated under the same ESC-50 SFX adaptation setup, and (2) capability-specific analyses of native operations such as SFX morphing, temporal and energy alignment, inpainting, and targeted editing. This framework combines objective metrics (including FAD, ImageBind-based reference alignment, and diversity across generated variants), together with a human study of perceptual identity preservation and transient diagnosis. Our study reveals complementary strengths and trade-offs across baselines for different production needs. Among the full-generation baselines evaluated under a shared ATA setting, AudioX provides the strongest overall trade-off between reference alignment and diversity while still supporting SFX morphing. Other baselines remain most suitable for specific editing operations. Our framework establishes a structured evaluation and decision protocol for referenceguided SFX variation and provides a practical basis for designing future unified industrial audio generation pipelines. Audio demosand further details can be found on the accompanying web page1.  \n1. INTRODUCTION  \nProduction Motivation— In SFX production, sound designers often rely on few reusable recordings, since manually designing variations is costly and time-consuming. This low variability can lead to perceptible repetition in interactive media, motivating systems that can produce useful variations from a reference audio clip (1; 2; 3; 4; 5) or from standard TTA generation (6; 7; 8), rather than synthesizing audio unconditionally (9) . In practice, an effective sound design system must do more than produce plausible audio as it is subject to multiple constraints. Unlike generic TTA generation, this setting requires jointly balancing realism, identity preservation, controllability, and usability.  \n1[https://melodiedesbos.github.io/sfx-eval-framework](https://melodiedesbos.github.io/sfx-eval-framework)  \nCopyright: © 2026 Mélodie Desbos et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4 .0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, adaptation, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.  \nGapsin Current Evaluations—Recent audio generation progress has made SFX generation increasingly accessible. Diffusion, flowmatching, and multimodal pipelines now support style transfer (10; 11) (or SFX morphing (12)), temporal conditioning (1), targeted editing (5), and inpainting (13) . However, these methods are typically evaluated only within their original task settings, such as TTA generation (10; 6), video-to-audio (VTA) synthesis (5; 14), foley alignment (1; 15","cbCaim1SU7Mvuqvm","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaim1SU7Mvuqvm","pdf",11350721,1,15,"English","en",105,"# Abstract\n# Introduction\n## Production Motivation\n## Gaps in Current Evaluations\n## Proposal of Evaluation Framework\n## Contributions","[{\"question\":\"What problem does the paper address in evaluating SFX generation methods?\",\"answer\":\"It addresses the lack of comparisons for reference-guided SFX variation, since existing evaluations are usually task-specific and tied to different settings such as text-to-audio or unconditional generation.\"},{\"question\":\"What are the two stages of the proposed evaluation protocol?\",\"answer\":\"Stage (1) evaluates all methods in a shared reference-conditioned reference-guided audio-to-audio (ATA) variation task using an ESC-50 SFX adaptation setup. Stage (2) performs capability-specific analyses of native operations like SFX morphing, temporal/energy alignment, inpainting, and targeted editing.\"},{\"question\":\"Which methods show the strongest trade-off under the shared ATA setting?\",\"answer\":\"Among the full-generation baselines evaluated under the shared ATA setting, AudioX provides the strongest overall trade-off between reference alignment and diversity while still supporting SFX morphing, while other baselines are better suited to specific editing operations.\"}]",1784206176,38,{"code":4,"msg":30,"data":31},"ok",{"site_id":24,"language":23,"slug":32,"title":13,"keywords":33,"description":14,"schema_data":34,"social_meta":86,"head_meta":88,"extra_data":90,"updated_unix":27},"a-production-oriented-framework-for-evaluation-of-sfx-generation","",{"@graph":35,"@context":85},[36,53,68],{"@type":37,"itemListElement":38},"BreadcrumbList",[39,43,47,50],{"item":40,"name":41,"@type":42,"position":20},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":44,"name":45,"@type":42,"position":46},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":48,"name":12,"@type":42,"position":49},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":51,"name":13,"@type":42,"position":52},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/a-production-oriented-framework-for-evaluation-of-sfx-generation/85773/",4,{"url":51,"name":13,"@type":54,"author":55,"headline":13,"publisher":57,"fileFormat":60,"inLanguage":23,"description":14,"dateModified":61,"datePublished":62,"encodingFormat":60,"isAccessibleForFree":63,"interactionStatistic":64},"DigitalDocument",{"name":9,"@type":56},"Person",{"url":40,"name":58,"@type":59},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-07-17","2026-07-16",true,{"@type":65,"interactionType":66,"userInteractionCount":20},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":67},"ViewAction",{"@type":69,"mainEntity":70},"FAQPage",[71,77,81],{"name":72,"@type":73,"acceptedAnswer":74},"What problem does the paper address in evaluating SFX generation methods?","Question",{"text":75,"@type":76},"It addresses the lack of comparisons for reference-guided SFX variation, since existing evaluations are usually task-specific and tied to different settings such as text-to-audio or unconditional generation.","Answer",{"name":78,"@type":73,"acceptedAnswer":79},"What are the two stages of the proposed evaluation protocol?",{"text":80,"@type":76},"Stage (1) evaluates all methods in a shared reference-conditioned reference-guided audio-to-audio (ATA) variation task using an ESC-50 SFX adaptation setup. Stage (2) performs capability-specific analyses of native operations like SFX morphing, temporal/energy alignment, inpainting, and targeted editing.",{"name":82,"@type":73,"acceptedAnswer":83},"Which methods show the strongest trade-off under the shared ATA setting?",{"text":84,"@type":76},"Among the full-generation baselines evaluated under the shared ATA setting, AudioX provides the strongest overall trade-off between reference alignment and diversity while still supporting SFX morphing, while other baselines are better suited to specific editing operations.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":51,"og:type":87,"og:title":13,"og:site_name":58,"og:description":14},"article",{"robots":89,"canonical":51},"index,follow",{"doc_id":7,"site_id":24},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":92},[93,97,101,105,110,115,120,123,128,131,135],{"id":20,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":94,"show_sort_weight":95,"slug":96},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":98,"show_sort_weight":99,"slug":100},"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":102,"show_sort_weight":103,"slug":104},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":106,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":107,"show_sort_weight":108,"slug":109},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":111,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":112,"show_sort_weight":113,"slug":114},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":116,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":117,"show_sort_weight":118,"slug":119},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":11,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":12,"show_sort_weight":121,"slug":122},30,"research-report",{"id":124,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":125,"show_sort_weight":126,"slug":127},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":126,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":129,"show_sort_weight":126,"slug":130},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":132,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":133,"show_sort_weight":132,"slug":134},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":136,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":137,"show_sort_weight":106,"slug":138},19,"General","general"]