cs.CVAug 25, 2026

What Do Audio-Visual Synchronization Metrics Actually Measure?

Authors: Jai Kumar Sharma, Peeyush Tapadiya

Organizations: Virginia Tech · Accenture

Abstract

Automatic AV-sync metrics are widely used to rank and train audio-visual generators, but they are rarely audited as measurement instruments. We jointly audit AV-Align, ImageBind AV-relevance, JavisScore, and Synchformer/DeSync under a common reliability protocol: controlled-distortion monotonicity, preprocessing sensitivity, rank uncertainty, cross-metric agreement, PEAVS-proxy agreement, and learned fusion. The result is an axis split, not a single winner: Synchformer/DeSync is the strongest temporal-offset tracker (τ=0.84τ=0.84), ImageBind/JavisScore better match the PEAVS human-aligned proxy (τ=0.20τ=0.20) and content-disruption families, and AV-Align is the weakest standalone metric. The metrics mutually disagree (Krippendorff α=0.066α=0.066), and neither linear nor simple kk-NN fusion improves PEAVS agreement over the best individual metric. We recommend reporting AV-sync as a Reliability Card (metric-family breakdowns with confidence intervals) rather than a single bare synchronization score.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables5 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Beyond Time Shifts: Adapting Omni-LLM as a Reference-Free Evaluator for Generative Audio-Visual Models

    Jul 10, 2026Yijie Qian, Juncheng Wang, Chao Xu +6Audio-Video GenerationGroup Relative Policy Optimization

  2. AV-SyncBench: Decoupled Benchmarking of Temporal and Semantic Audio-Visual Synchronization

    Jul 1, 2026Tianhong Zhou, Mingyang Han, Boyu Li +8Audio-Visual SynchronizationAudio-Visual Alignment

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

    Oct 12, 2026Kaisi Guan, Ying Ba, Wenjing Wang +4Audio-Visual SynchronizationAudio-Video Generation