SAM Audio: Segment Anything in Audio

Bowen Shi; Andros Tjandra; John Hoffman; Helin Wang; Yi-Chiao Wu; Luya Gao; Julius Richter; Matt Le; Apoorv Vyas; Sanyuan Chen; Christoph Feichtenhofer; Piotr Dollár; Wei-Ning Hsu; Ann Lee

arXiv · 2512.18099

SAM Audio: Segment Anything in Audio

Bowen Shi·Andros Tjandra·John Hoffman·Helin Wang·Yi-Chiao Wu·Luya Gao·Julius Richter·Matt Le·Apoorv Vyas·Sanyuan Chen·Christoph Feichtenhofer·Piotr Dollár·Wei-Ning Hsu·Ann Lee

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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.

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Bowen Shi, Andros Tjandra, John Hoffman, Helin Wang, Yi-Chiao Wu, Luya Gao, Julius Richter, Matt Le, Apoorv Vyas, Sanyuan Chen, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Piotr Dollár, Wei-Ning Hsu, Ann Lee. 2025-12-19. SAM Audio: Segment Anything in Audio. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18099

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