English

SAM Audio: Segment Anything in Audio

Audio and Speech Processing 2025-12-24 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

General audio source separation is a key capability for multimodal AI systems that can perceive and reason about sound. Despite substantial progress in recent years, existing separation models are either domain-specific, designed for fixed categories such as speech or music, or limited in controllability, supporting only a single prompting modality such as text. In this work, we present SAM Audio, a foundation model for general audio separation that unifies text, visual, and temporal span prompting within a single framework. Built on a diffusion transformer architecture, SAM Audio is trained with flow matching on large-scale audio data spanning speech, music, and general sounds, and can flexibly separate target sources described by language, visual masks, or temporal spans. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse suite of benchmarks, including general sound, speech, music, and musical instrument separation in both in-the-wild and professionally produced audios, substantially outperforming prior general-purpose and specialized systems. Furthermore, we introduce a new real-world separation benchmark with human-labeled multimodal prompts and a reference-free evaluation model that correlates strongly with human judgment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.18099,
  title  = {SAM Audio: Segment Anything in Audio},
  author = {Bowen Shi and Andros Tjandra and John Hoffman and Helin Wang and Yi-Chiao Wu and Luya Gao and Julius Richter and Matt Le and Apoorv Vyas and Sanyuan Chen and Christoph Feichtenhofer and Piotr Dollár and Wei-Ning Hsu and Ann Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.18099},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:34:26.554Z