Spatial Transfusion: From Structured Spatial Scene Understanding to Generation and Editing

Abstract

Spatial audio conveys not only what sounds are present, but where they originate and how they interact with the environment. Recent audio-language models increasingly understand and reason about such scenes, yet spatial audio understanding, generation, and editing remain largely separate. We present Spatial Transfusion, a unified first-order ambisonics (FOA) framework that extends a pretrained spatial audio understanding model to generation and editing through flow matching over VAE latents. We formulate editing as a structured scene transformation over a taxonomy of atomic edits. Keeping the pretrained backbone frozen, we introduce modality-based LoRA routing and a curriculum that progressively adds generation, editing, and natural-language interaction. Experiments show that Spatial Transfusion largely preserves spatial understanding while outperforming full fine-tuning in generation and editing. The resulting model supports controllable FOA generation and editing through both structured and natural-language interfaces. Audio samples are available at https://microsoft.github.io/spatial-transfusion/