Audio-Visual Segmentation via Depth-Guided Collaborative Modeling

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-visual segmentation (AVS) plays a critical role in multimodal machine learning by effectively integrating audio and visual cues to precisely segment objects or regions within visual scenes. Recent AVS methods have demonstrated significant improvements. However, they overlook the inherent frequency-domain contradictions between audio and visual modalities--the substantial noise often present in audio high-frequency signals vs. the structurally rich details in visual high-frequency signals. Ignoring these differences can result in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we rethink the AVS task from a deeper perspective by reformulating AVS task as a frequency-domain decomposition and recomposition problem. To this end, we introduce a novel Frequency-Aware Audio-Visual Segmentation (FAVS) framework consisting of two key modules: Frequency-Domain Enhanced Decomposer (FDED) module and Synergistic Cross-Modal Consistency (SCMC) module. FDED module employs a residual-based iterative frequency decomposition to discriminate modality-specific semantics and structural features, and SCMC module leverages a mixture-of-experts architecture to reinforce semantic consistency and modality-specific feature preservation through dynamic expert routing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our FAVS framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets, and abundant qualitative visualizations further verify the effectiveness of the proposed FDED and SCMC modules. The project repository is available at https://github.com/happylife-pk/FAVS.

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) requires predicting pixel-wise masks of sounding objects by grounding acoustic signals in visual space. In multi-source scenes, concurrent sound sources often remain entangled within shared visual representations, leading to merged masks or unstable specialization when using standard alignment-focused transformer architectures. To address this, we present SlotAVS, an object-centric framework driven by competitive bi-modal slot attention. While robust foundation models provide rich semantic priors, SlotAVS shifts the paradigm from global cross-modal fusion to explicit competitive binding. By initializing discrete object slots from temporal audio sequences and enforcing strict slot-wise competition over spatial visual tokens, our method structurally mitigates the blending of distinct acoustic entities. Further, to stabilize instance-level learning, we introduce a Hungarian matching strategy that optimally aligns slots with ground-truth objects using spatial and boundary overlap. Coupled with a numerically stable, confidence-aware mask fusion mechanism, SlotAVS robustly aggregates multi-source predictions. Extensive experiments on the AVSBench dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, achieving 88.6% mIoU on the Single-Source (S4) split and 71.7% mIoU on the Multi-Source (MS3) split. These results show that explicit competitive binding is critical for complex audio-visual scene understanding and effectively leveraging foundation-model priors without relying solely on their capacity.