PRIMED: Adaptive Modality Suppression for Referring Audio-Visual Segmentation via Biased Competition

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/

This report presents an Audio-aware Referring Video Object Segmentation (Ref-VOS) pipeline tailored to the MEVIS_Audio setting, where the referring expression is provided in spoken form rather than as clean text. Compared with a standard Sa2VA-based Ref-VOS pipeline, the proposed system introduces two additional front-end stages: speech transcription and visual existence verification. Specifically, we first employ VibeVoice-ASR to convert long-form spoken input into a structured textual transcript. Since audio-derived queries are inherently noisy and may describe entities that are not visually present in the video, we then introduce an Omni-based judgment module to determine whether the transcribed target can be grounded in the visual content. If the target is judged to be absent, the pipeline terminates early and outputs all-zero masks. Otherwise, the transcript is transformed into a segmentation-oriented prompt and fed into Sa2VA to obtain a coarse mask trajectory over the full video. Importantly, this trajectory is treated as an initial semantic hypothesis rather than a final prediction. On top of it, an agentic refinement layer evaluates query reliability, temporal relevance, anchor quality, and potential error sources, and may invoke SAM3 to improve spatial boundary precision and temporal consistency. The resulting framework explicitly decomposes the MEVIS_Audio task into audio-to-text conversion, visual existence verification, coarse video segmentation, and agent-guided refinement. Such a staged design is substantially more appropriate for audio-conditioned Ref-VOS than directly sending noisy ASR outputs into a segmentation model.

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) targets pixel level localization of sounding emitting objects in videos. However, existing models rely on dense cross-modal attention with quadratic computational cost, limiting their suitability for resource efficient deployment. Most efficiency oriented methods focus on backbone reduction and overlook the interaction module as the primary bottleneck. This paper proposes LightAVSeg, a lightweight framework that replaces heavy attention with a decoupled design for semantic filtering and spatial grounding, resulting in interaction costs that scale linearly with spatial resolution. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary alignment loss to enforce semantic consistency during training with zero inference overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LightAVSeg achieves a new state-of-the-art among lightweight methods: with 20.5M parameters ~1/7 of AVSegFormer), it reaches 50.4 mIoU on the MS3 benchmark and enables efficient inference on a mobile processor.