EchoFoley: Event-Centric Hierarchical Control for Video Grounded Creative Sound Generation

Sound effects build an essential layer of multimodal storytelling, shaping the emotional atmosphere and the narrative semantics of videos. Despite recent advancement in video–text–to–audio (VT2A), the current formulation faces three key limitations: (1) an imbalance between visual and textual conditioning that leads to visual dominance; (2) the absence of a concrete definition for fine-grained controllable generation; (3) weak instruction understanding and following, as existing datasets rely on brief categorical tags. To address these limitations, we introduce EchoFoley (Event-Centric Hierarchical cOntrol Foley), a new task designed for video-grounded sound generation with both event-level local control and hierarchical semantic control. Our symbolic representation for sounding events specifies when, what, and how each sound is produced within a video or instruction, enabling fine-grained controls like sound generation, insertion, and editing. To support this task, we construct EchoFoley-6k, a large-scale, expert-curated benchmark containing over 6,000 video–instruction–annotation triplets and 42,000 fine-grained sounding event annotations.Building upon this foundation, we propose EchoVidia, a sounding-event-centric agentic generation framework with slow-fast thinking strategy. Experiments show that EchoVidia surpasses recent VT2A models by 40.7% in controllability and 12.5% in perceptual quality.