Julia Wilkins

Julia Wilkins, Justin Salamon, Magdalena Fuentes et al.

Finding the right sound effects (SFX) to match moments in a video is a difficult and time-consuming task, and relies heavily on the quality and completeness of text metadata. Retrieving high-quality (HQ) SFX using a video frame directly as the query is an attractive alternative, removing the reliance on text metadata and providing a low barrier to entry for non-experts. Due to the lack of HQ audio-visual training data, previous work on audio-visual retrieval relies on YouTube (in-the-wild) videos of varied quality for training, where the audio is often noisy and the video of amateur quality. As such it is unclear whether these systems would generalize to the task of matching HQ audio to production-quality video. To address this, we propose a multimodal framework for recommending HQ SFX given a video frame by (1) leveraging large language models and foundational vision-language models to bridge HQ audio and video to create audio-visual pairs, resulting in a highly scalable automatic audio-visual data curation pipeline; and (2) using pre-trained audio and visual encoders to train a contrastive learning-based retrieval system. We show that our system, trained using our automatic data curation pipeline, significantly outperforms baselines trained on in-the-wild data on the task of HQ SFX retrieval for video. Furthermore, while the baselines fail to generalize to this task, our system generalizes well from clean to in-the-wild data, outperforming the baselines on a dataset of YouTube videos despite only being trained on the HQ audio-visual pairs. A user study confirms that people prefer SFX retrieved by our system over the baseline 67% of the time both for HQ and in-the-wild data. Finally, we present ablations to determine the impact of model and data pipeline design choices on downstream retrieval performance. Please visit our project website to listen to and view our SFX retrieval results.

Lorena Piedras, Lucas Rosenblatt, Julia Wilkins

Detecting "toxic" language in internet content is a pressing social and technical challenge. In this work, we focus on PERSPECTIVE from Jigsaw, a state-of-the-art tool that promises to score the "toxicity" of text, with a recent model update that claims impressive results (Lees et al., 2022). We seek to challenge certain normative claims about toxic language by proposing a new benchmark, Selected Adversarial SemanticS, or SASS. We evaluate PERSPECTIVE on SASS, and compare to low-effort alternatives, like zero-shot and few-shot GPT-3 prompt models, in binary classification settings. We find that PERSPECTIVE exhibits troubling shortcomings across a number of our toxicity categories. SASS provides a new tool for evaluating performance on previously undetected toxic language that avoids common normative pitfalls. Our work leads us to emphasize the importance of questioning assumptions made by tools already in deployment for toxicity detection in order to anticipate and prevent disparate harms.

Julia Wilkins, Jaehun Kim, Matthew E. P. Davies et al.

Music representations are the backbone of modern recommendation systems, powering playlist generation, similarity search, and personalized discovery. Yet most embeddings offer little control for adjusting a single musical attribute, e.g., changing only the mood of a track while preserving its genre or instrumentation. In this work, we address the problem of controllable music retrieval through embedding-based transformation, where the objective is to retrieve songs that remain similar to a seed track but are modified along one chosen dimension. We propose a novel framework for mood-guided music embedding transformation, which learns a mapping from a seed audio embedding to a target embedding guided by mood labels, while preserving other musical attributes. Because mood cannot be directly altered in the seed audio, we introduce a sampling mechanism that retrieves proxy targets to balance diversity with similarity to the seed. We train a lightweight translation model using this sampling strategy and introduce a novel joint objective that encourages transformation and information preservation. Extensive experiments on two datasets show strong mood transformation performance while retaining genre and instrumentation far better than training-free baselines, establishing controllable embedding transformation as a promising paradigm for personalized music retrieval.