Acoustically Grounded Cost Learning for Open-Vocabulary Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Summary
The authors address a problem where a computer tries to identify sound-making objects pixel-by-pixel in videos from many different categories, including ones it hasn't seen before. Previous methods grouped all objects together, which confused the computer because different objects can sound very different. To fix this, the authors created a new method that uses sounds to better link the visual information to specific categories. They developed special techniques to highlight sounding parts in each video frame and to tell apart confusing categories based on sound and meaning. Their tests show this approach works better than earlier methods, especially on new object categories.
Authors
Tianrui Hui, Shaofei Huang, Qisong Han, Yaxiong Wang, Lechao Cheng, Zhedong Zheng, Zhun Zhong, Richang Hong, Meng Wang
Abstract
Open-Vocabulary Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (OV-AVSS) aims to perform pixel-level segmentation of sound-emitting objects from an open set of categories. The previous method relies on a class-agnostic foreground definition, which groups semantically diverse objects into a heterogeneous positive set, causing the model to learn unstable sounding patterns and produce unreliable proposals. To address this, we reformulate the objective to be category-specific and propose a novel Acoustically Grounded Cost Learning (AGCL) framework to transform the static, audio-agnostic visual-text priors into dynamic, audio-grounded cost representations. For intra-category soundingness discovery, we devise Audio-Modulated Cost Generation (AMCG) and Audio-Guided Temporal Aggregation (AGTA) modules to enable both frame-level sounding region highlighting and video-level temporal refinement with a low-intrusive audio injection mechanism. For inter-category distractor discrimination, we introduce a Synergistic Distractor Mining (SDM) strategy, which selectively penalizes acoustically and semantically confusing negative categories to learn more discriminative decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on the AVSBench-OV dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches, particularly on unseen categories. Code is available at https://github.com/spyflying/AGCL.