Revisiting Frame-Wise Saliency for Audio Moment Retrieval

This paper revisits frame-wise saliency for audio moment retrieval (AMR). We show that the frame-wise saliency sequence, conventionally used only as an auxiliary output in DETR-based AMR models, can itself serve as an effective source of moment predictions. We convert the saliency sequence into ranked moments using a simple SED-inspired segmentation rule with no learned parameters, enabling moment retrieval directly from frame-wise temporal information. On the CASTELLA dataset, saliency-based prediction consistently outperforms decoder-based prediction from the same model across all 18 runs of QD-DETR and CG-DETR. For QD-DETR, simply replacing the inference output improves R1@0.7 from 21.0 to 36.1. The advantage remains 7-15 points when the two outputs are evaluated at their independently selected best epochs. The same tendency extends to TaskWeave and UVCOM, whereas TR-DETR shows the opposite behavior, suggesting that how saliency construction may matter. The performance gap is especially pronounced for short moments: for queries whose annotated moments average at most 2 s, R1@0.7 improves from 6.3 to 27.8 with QD-DETR. Decoder supervision nevertheless benefits saliency-based prediction, indicating that its role during training differs from the utility of its inference output.