Delayed Bidirectional Alignment via Disentangled Audio Semantics for Audio-Visual Segmentation
Authors: Jingqi Tian, Yiheng Du, Haoji Zhang, Yuji Wang, Isaac Ning Lee, Xulong Bai, Tianrui Zhu, Jingxuan Niu, +1 more
Organizations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, China · Peking University, China
Abstract
Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to localize sound-producing objects at the pixel level by integrating auditory and visual cues. However, existing methods often struggle with multi-source entanglement and audio-visual misalignment, leading to a dominance bias toward acoustically or visually salient objects (i.e., louder or larger ones) at the expense of subtler or co-occurring sources. To address these challenges, we propose DDAVS: Delayed Bidirectional Alignment via Disentangled Audio Semantics for Audio-Visual Segmentation. To mitigate multi-source entanglement, DDAVS employs learnable queries to extract audio semantics and anchor them within a structured semantic space derived from an audio prototype memory bank. This process is further optimized through contrastive learning to enhance discriminability and robustness. To alleviate audio-visual misalignment, DDAVS introduces dual cross attention with delayed modality interaction, improving the robustness of multimodal alignment. Extensive experiments on the AVS-Objects and VPO benchmarks demonstrate that DDAVS achieves state-of-the-art performance across single-source, multi-source, and multi-class multi-instance scenarios. These results validate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our framework under challenging real-world audio-visual segmentation conditions. Project page: https://trilarflagz.github.io/DDAVS-page/
Audio-based video object segmentation aims to locate and segment objects in videos conditioned on audio cues, requiring precise understanding of both appearance and motion. Recent audio-driven video segmentation methods extend MLLMs by fusing audio and visual features for end-to-end localization. Despite their promise, these approaches are computationally intensive, struggle with aligning temporal audio cues to dynamic video content, and depend on large paired audio-video datasets. To address these challenges, we present ASR-SaSaSa2VA, a resource-efficient framework for audio-guided video segmentation. The key idea is to convert audio inputs into textual motion descriptions via automatic speech recognition (ASR) models and then leverage pre-trained text-based referring video segmentation models (e.g., SaSaSa2VA) for pixel-level predictions. To further enhance robustness, we incorporate a no-target expression detection module, implemented by a fine-tuned audio-based MLLM, which filters out audio clips that do not refer to any target object. This design allows the system to exploit strong pre-trained models while effectively handling ambiguous or irrelevant audio inputs. Our approach achieves a final score of 80.7 in the 5th PVUW Challenge (MeViS-v2-Audio track), earning the second-place ranking.
Referring Audio-Visual Segmentation (Ref-AVS) seeks to localize and segment target objects in video frames based on visual, auditory, and textual referring cues. The task is challenging because the relevance of different modalities varies across referring expressions and scenes, while existing methods typically treat multimodal cues as homogeneous inputs for fusion, prompting, or reasoning, making them vulnerable to irrelevant or misleading modalities. To address this problem, we propose PRIMED, inspired by the biased competition theory in cognitive neuroscience, which explicitly models both visual perception and language-driven prior modulation, and enables more accurate Ref-AVS by adaptive modality suppression. Specifically, a Modality Prior Decoder first estimates whether the referring expression relies primarily on audio, vision, or their joint interaction, generating a modality prior to adaptively guide high-level attention. A Token Distiller further extracts compact global visual tokens from high-level features and shares them across Competition-aware Cross-modal Fusion modules to provide hierarchical global context. Additionally, we introduce a Spatial-Aware Semantic Alignment loss to further enhance foreground-background discrimination through contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on the Ref-AVS benchmark demonstrate that PRIMED achieves state-of-the-art overall performance.
Recently, significant progress has been made in multi-modal continual learning, aiming to learn new tasks sequentially in multi-modal settings while preserving performance on previously learned ones. However, existing methods mainly focus on coarse-grained tasks, with limitations in addressing modality entanglement in fine-grained continual learning settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel Continual Audio-Visual Segmentation (CAVS) task, aiming to continuously segment new classes guided by audio. Through comprehensive analysis, two critical challenges are identified: 1) multi-modal semantic drift, where a sounding objects is labeled as background in sequential tasks; 2) co-occurrence confusion, where frequent co-occurring classes tend to be confused. In this work, a Collision-based Multi-modal Rehearsal (CMR) framework is designed to address these challenges. Specifically, for multi-modal semantic drift, a Multi-modal Sample Selection (MSS) strategy is proposed to select samples with high modal consistency for rehearsal. Meanwhile, for co-occurence confusion, a Collision-based Sample Rehearsal (CSR) mechanism is designed, allowing for the increase of rehearsal sample frequency of those confusable classes during training process. Moreover, we construct three audio-visual incremental scenarios to verify effectiveness of our method. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms single-modal continual learning methods. Code can be seen at https://github.com/cqu-student/CAVS-CMR.