Audio-visual speaker tracking aims to localize and track active speakers by leveraging auditory and visual cues, enabling fine-grained, human-centric scene understanding. This capability is essential for real-world applications such as intelligent video editing, surveillance, and human-computer interaction. However, existing datasets are largely limited to simple or homogeneous audio-visual scenes with coarse annotations. Such oversimplified settings bias evaluation toward static audio-visual co-occurrence, rather than rigorously assessing robust spatiotemporal modeling and cross-modal reasoning in complex, dynamic scenes. To address these limitations, we introduce AVTrack, a human-centric audio-visual instance segmentation (AVIS) dataset designed for dynamic real-world scenarios. AVTrack features diverse and challenging conditions, including camera motion, visual occlusions, and position changes. Evaluations of representative AVIS methods on AVTrack reveal substantial performance degradation, establishing AVTrack as a challenging benchmark for robust human-centric audio-visual scene understanding in complex environments. We further provide a simple yet effective baseline to facilitate future research. Project website: https://FudanCVL.github.io/AVTrack/
Audio-visual instance segmentation (AVIS) requires accurately identifying and tracking individual sounding objects with pixel-level masks. Existing methods struggle to match overlapping acoustic events with visual instances and handle asynchronous audio-visual dynamics. Therefore, two critical questions arise: how can a model establish precise correspondence between overlapping sound sources and visual instances, and how can a model maintain robust tracking when audio and visual signals are temporally misaligned?This paper proposes Hear to See (H2S), addressing these challenges through two mechanisms. The Acoustic-Semantic Projector (ASP) disentangles mixed audio and establishes hierarchical correspondence from semantic to spatial domains. The Asynchronous Dynamics Modulator (ADM) adaptively adjusts state transitions via audio-modulated Mamba, prioritizing current information during dynamic variations and maintaining continuity in stable periods.Experiments on AVISeg show H2S achieves SOTA performance, attaining 48.54 mAP with a COCO pretrained ResNet50 and surpassing the previous by 7.8%. The code will be open-sourced once the paper is accepted. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/leiyeliu/H2S.
Real-world audio-visual understanding requires chaining evidence that is sparse, temporally dispersed, and split across the visual and auditory streams, whereas existing benchmarks largely fail to evaluate this capability. They restrict videos to short clips, isolate modalities, or reduce questions to one-hop perception. We introduce TraceAV-Bench, the first benchmark to jointly evaluate multi-hop reasoning over long audio-visual trajectories and multimodal hallucination robustness. TraceAV-Bench comprises 2,200 rigorously validated multiple-choice questions over 578 long videos, totaling 339.5 hours, spanning 4 evaluation dimensions and 15 sub-tasks. Each question is grounded in an explicit reasoning chain that averages 3.68 hops across a 15.1-minute temporal span. The dataset is built by a three-step semi-automated pipeline followed by a strict quality assurance process. Evaluation of multiple representative OmniLLMs on TraceAV-Bench reveals that the benchmark poses a persistent challenge across all models, with the strongest closed-source model (Gemini 3.1 Pro) reaching only 68.29% on general tasks, and the best open-source model (Ming-Flash-Omni-2.0) reaching 51.70%, leaving substantial headroom. Moreover, we find that robustness to multimodal hallucination is largely decoupled from general multimodal reasoning performance. We anticipate that TraceAV-Bench will stimulate further research toward OmniLLMs that can reason coherently and faithfully over long-form audio-visual content.
Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) enhances speech recognition robustness by leveraging visual cues, while real-world scenarios remain challenging due to viewpoint variation, audio distortion, and visual occlusion, which degrade modality quality and increase audio-visual asynchrony. In this paper, we propose a novel Modality-aware Multi-view Self-supervised representation framework for robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (M2S-AVSR). First, we introduce a multi-view representation learning encoder to learn view-invariant visual speech representations. Next, we employ a modality-aware module that explicitly models modality quality and cross-modal synchrony to perform fine-grained modality-aware fusion, enabling fine-grained visual information injection during decoding. In addition, we release AISHELL8-RealScene, a public multi-scenario, multi-view conversational audio-visual dataset recorded in real-world environments, and establish a speech recognition benchmark on it. Experiments on English and Mandarin benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method under challenging conditions. On LRS3, M2S-AVSR achieves up to 29.4% relative improvement under viewpoint perturbation and visual degradation settings. Our method also achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the MISP2021-AVSR test set. On AISHELL8-RealScene, it achieves the best result in outdoor scenes. The proposed method and dataset provide useful support for future research on robust speech and multimodal tasks under realistic conditions.