Shift-Aware Identity-Guided Latent Refinement for Referring Audio--Visual Segmentation

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.

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-based Referring Video Object Segmentation (ARVOS) requires grounding audio queries into pixel-level object masks over time, posing challenges in bridging acoustic signals with spatio-temporal visual representations. In this report, we present VIRST-Audio, a practical framework built upon a pretrained RVOS model integrated with a vision-language architecture. Instead of relying on audio-specific training, we convert input audio into text using an ASR module and perform segmentation using text-based supervision, enabling effective transfer from text-based reasoning to audio-driven scenarios. To improve robustness, we further incorporate an existence-aware gating mechanism that estimates whether the referred target object is present in the video and suppresses predictions when it is absent, reducing hallucinated masks and stabilizing segmentation behavior. We evaluate our approach on the MeViS-Audio track of the 5th PVUW Challenge, where VIRST-Audio achieves 3rd place, demonstrating strong generalization and reliable performance in audio-based referring video segmentation.