Our goal is to collect a large-scale audio-visual dataset with low label noise from videos in the wild using computer vision techniques. The resulting dataset can be used for training and evaluating audio recognition models. We make three contributions. First, we propose a scalable pipeline based on computer vision techniques to create an audio dataset from open-source media. Our pipeline involves obtaining videos from YouTube; using image classification algorithms to localize audio-visual correspondence; and filtering out ambient noise using audio verification. Second, we use this pipeline to curate the VGGSound dataset consisting of more than 210k videos for 310 audio classes. Third, we investigate various Convolutional Neural Network~(CNN) architectures and aggregation approaches to establish audio recognition baselines for our new dataset. Compared to existing audio datasets, VGGSound ensures audio-visual correspondence and is collected under unconstrained conditions. Code and the dataset are available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vggsound/
VGGSounder: Audio-Visual Evaluations for Foundation Models
Technical University of Munich, MCML（慕尼黑技术大学，MCML）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Tübingen AI Center（图宾根人工智能中心）；MPI for Intelligent Systems, ELLIS Institute（智能系统Max Planck研究所，ELLIS研究所）
Conventional audio-visual models have independent audio and video branches. In this work, we unify the audio and visual branches by designing a Unified Audio-Visual Model (UAVM). The UAVM achieves a new state-of-the-art audio-visual event classification accuracy of 65.8% on VGGSound. More interestingly, we also find a few intriguing properties of UAVM that the modality-independent counterparts do not have.
MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福大学）
CCStereo: Audio-Visual Contextual and Contrastive Learning for Binaural Audio Generation
Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（澳大利亚机器学习研究所，阿德莱德大学）；Sony Group Corporation（索尼集团）；Sony AI, Sony Group Corporation（索尼人工智能，索尼集团）
Audio-visual representation learning is an important task from the perspective of designing machines with the ability to understand complex events. To this end, we propose a novel multimodal framework that instantiates multiple instance learning. We show that the learnt representations are useful for classifying events and localizing their characteristic audio-visual elements. The system is trained using only video-level event labels without any timing information. An important feature of our method is its capacity to learn from unsynchronized audio-visual events. We achieve state-of-the-art r…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Recent progress in deep learning has enabled many advances in sound separation and visual scene understanding. However, extracting sound sources which are apparent in natural videos remains an open problem. In this work, we present AudioScope, a novel audio-visual sound separation framework that can be trained without supervision to isolate on-screen sound sources from real in-the-wild videos. Prior audio-visual separation work assumed artificial limitations on the domain of sound classes (e.g., to speech or music), constrained the number of sources, and required strong sound separation or vis…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Speech separation aims to separate individual voice from an audio mixture of multiple simultaneous talkers. Although audio-only approaches achieve satisfactory performance, they build on a strategy to handle the predefined conditions, limiting their application in the complex auditory scene. Towards the cocktail party problem, we propose a novel audio-visual speech separation model. In our model, we use the face detector to detect the number of speakers in the scene and use visual information to avoid the permutation problem. To improve our model's generalization ability to unknown speakers, w…
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Learning to classify video data from classes not included in the training data, i.e. video-based zero-shot learning, is challenging. We conjecture that the natural alignment between the audio and visual modalities in video data provides a rich training signal for learning discriminative multi-modal representations. Focusing on the relatively underexplored task of audio-visual zero-shot learning, we propose to learn multi-modal representations from audio-visual data using cross-modal attention and exploit textual label embeddings for transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes. T…
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Tencent PCG（腾讯平台与内容事业群）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Having access to multi-modal cues (e.g. vision and audio) empowers some cognitive tasks to be done faster compared to learning from a single modality. In this work, we propose to transfer knowledge across heterogeneous modalities, even though these data modalities may not be semantically correlated. Rather than directly aligning the representations of different modalities, we compose audio, image, and video representations across modalities to uncover richer multi-modal knowledge. Our main idea is to learn a compositional embedding that closes the cross-modal semantic gap and captures the task…
The thud of a bouncing ball, the onset of speech as lips open -- when visual and audio events occur together, it suggests that there might be a common, underlying event that produced both signals. In this paper, we argue that the visual and audio components of a video signal should be modeled jointly using a fused multisensory representation. We propose to learn such a representation in a self-supervised way, by training a neural network to predict whether video frames and audio are temporally aligned. We use this learned representation for three applications: (a) sound source localization, i.…
Dynamic Derivation and Elimination: Audio Visual Segmentation with Enhanced Audio Semantics
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；NetEase Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；Matrix Verse AI；CSIRO Data61（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61部）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）
PrismAudio: Decomposed Chain-of-Thoughts and Multi-dimensional Rewards for Video-to-Audio Generation
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)（香港科技大学）；Tongyi Fun Team, Alibaba Group（通义Fun团队，阿里巴巴集团）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)（香港中文大学）
Semantic Noise Reduction via Teacher-Guided Dual-Path Audio-Visual Representation Learning
Foundation Model Research Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所基础模型研究中心）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Objecteye Inc.（北京眼神科技有限公司）
Video summarization attracts attention for efficient video representation, retrieval, and browsing to ease volume and traffic surge problems. Although video summarization mostly uses the visual channel for compaction, the benefits of audio-visual modeling appeared in recent literature. The information coming from the audio channel can be a result of audio-visual correlation in the video content. In this study, we propose a new audio-visual video summarization framework integrating four ways of audio-visual information fusion with GRU-based and attention-based networks. Furthermore, we investig…
In this paper, we propose to make a systematic study on machines multisensory perception under attacks. We use the audio-visual event recognition task against multimodal adversarial attacks as a proxy to investigate the robustness of audio-visual learning. We attack audio, visual, and both modalities to explore whether audio-visual integration still strengthens perception and how different fusion mechanisms affect the robustness of audio-visual models. For interpreting the multimodal interactions under attacks, we learn a weakly-supervised sound source visual localization model to localize sou…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Existing audio-visual event localization (AVE) handles manually trimmed videos with only a single instance in each of them. However, this setting is unrealistic as natural videos often contain numerous audio-visual events with different categories. To better adapt to real-life applications, in this paper we focus on the task of dense-localizing audio-visual events, which aims to jointly localize and recognize all audio-visual events occurring in an untrimmed video. The problem is challenging as it requires fine-grained audio-visual scene and context understanding. To tackle this problem, we in…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；ASUS Intelligent Cloud Services（华硕智能云服务）
Human perceives rich auditory experience with distinct sound heard by ears. Videos recorded with binaural audio particular simulate how human receives ambient sound. However, a large number of videos are with monaural audio only, which would degrade the user experience due to the lack of ambient information. To address this issue, we propose an audio spatialization framework to convert a monaural video into a binaural one exploiting the relationship across audio and visual components. By preserving the left-right consistency in both audio and visual modalities, our learning strategy can be vie…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd（华为技术加拿大有限公司）；University of Victoria（维多利亚大学）
We propose a new framework for extracting visual information about a scene only using audio signals. Audio-based methods can overcome some of the limitations of vision-based methods i.e., they do not require "line-of-sight", are robust to occlusions and changes in illumination, and can function as a backup in case vision/lidar sensors fail. Therefore, audio-based methods can be useful even for applications in which only visual information is of interest Our framework is based on Manifold Learning and consists of two steps. First, we train a Vector-Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder to learn th…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute（上海期智研究院）
From the patter of rain to the crunch of snow, the sounds we hear often convey the visual textures that appear within a scene. In this paper, we present a method for learning visual styles from unlabeled audio-visual data. Our model learns to manipulate the texture of a scene to match a sound, a problem we term audio-driven image stylization. Given a dataset of paired audio-visual data, we learn to modify input images such that, after manipulation, they are more likely to co-occur with a given input sound. In quantitative and qualitative evaluations, our sound-based model outperforms label-bas…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
With the development of deep learning and artificial intelligence, audio synthesis has a pivotal role in the area of machine learning and shows strong applicability in the industry. Meanwhile, significant efforts have been dedicated by researchers to handle multimodal tasks at present such as audio-visual multimodal processing. In this paper, we conduct a survey on audio synthesis and audio-visual multimodal processing, which helps understand current research and future trends. This review focuses on text to speech(TTS), music generation and some tasks that combine visual and acoustic informat…
Learning from audio-visual data offers many possibilities to express correspondence between the audio and visual content, similar to the human perception that relates aural and visual information. In this work, we present a method for self-supervised representation learning based on audio-visual spatial alignment (AVSA), a more sophisticated alignment task than the audio-visual correspondence (AVC). In addition to the correspondence, AVSA also learns from the spatial location of acoustic and visual content. Based on 360$^\text{o}$ video and Ambisonics audio, we propose selection of visual obje…
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校计算机科学系）
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Current audio-visual separation methods share a standard architecture design where an audio encoder-decoder network is fused with visual encoding features at the encoder bottleneck. This design confounds the learning of multi-modal feature encoding with robust sound decoding for audio separation. To generalize to a new instrument: one must finetune the entire visual and audio network for all musical instruments. We re-formulate visual-sound separation task and propose Instrument as Query (iQuery) with a flexible query expansion mechanism. Our approach ensures cross-modal consistency and cross-…
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Cisco（思科）
People can easily imagine the potential sound while seeing an event. This natural synchronization between audio and visual signals reveals their intrinsic correlations. To this end, we propose to learn the audio-visual correlations from the perspective of cross-modal generation in a self-supervised manner, the learned correlations can be then readily applied in multiple downstream tasks such as the audio-visual cross-modal localization and retrieval. We introduce a novel Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) framework that consists of Multiple encoders and a Shared decoder (MS-VAE) with an additional …
