# V-SlowFast Network for Efficient Visual Sound Separation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08867 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08867/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [Look, Listen and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08168/) (2017)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Two-Stream Network Fusion for Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06573/) (2016)
- [Audio-Visual Scene Analysis with Self-Supervised Multisensory Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03641/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised MultiModal Versatile Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16228/) (2020)
- [Learning Correspondence from the Cycle-Consistency of Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07593/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Learning by Cross-Modal Audio-Video Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12667/) (2019)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [Objects that Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06651/) (2017)
- [Cooperative Learning of Audio and Video Models from Self-Supervised Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00230/) (2018)
- [SoundNet: Learning Sound Representations from Unlabeled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09001/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Co-training for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09709/) (2020)
- [EPIC-Fusion: Audio-Visual Temporal Binding for Egocentric Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08498/) (2019)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Hard Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02691/) (2021)
- [Listen to Look: Action Recognition by Previewing Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04487/) (2019)
- [The Sound of Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05979/) (2019)
- [Audiovisual SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08740/) (2020)
- [SCSampler: Sampling Salient Clips from Video for Efficient Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04289/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Audio-Visual Synchronisation in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04432/) (2021)
- [Audio-visual Generalised Zero-shot Learning with Cross-modal Attention and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03598/) (2022)
- [VGGSounder: Audio-Visual Evaluations for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08237/) (2025)
- [Anchors Aweigh! Sail for Optimal Unified Multi-Modal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02086/) (2024)
- [Beyond Visual Field of View: Perceiving 3D Environment with Echoes and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01136/) (2022)
- [Modulating State Space Model with SlowFast Framework for Compute-Efficient Ultra Low-Latency Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02019/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The objective of this paper is to perform visual sound separation: i) we study visual sound separation on spectrograms of different temporal resolutions; ii) we propose a new light yet efficient three-stream framework V-SlowFast that operates on Visual frame, Slow spectrogram, and Fast spectrogram. The Slow spectrogram captures the coarse temporal resolution while the Fast spectrogram contains the fine-grained temporal resolution; iii) we introduce two contrastive objectives to encourage the network to learn discriminative visual features for separating sounds; iv) we propose an audio-visual global attention module for audio and visual feature fusion; v) the introduced V-SlowFast model outperforms previous state-of-the-art in single-frame based visual sound separation on small- and large-scale datasets: MUSIC-21, AVE, and VGG-Sound. We also propose a small V-SlowFast architecture variant, which achieves 74.2% reduction in the number of model parameters and 81.4% reduction in GMACs compared to the previous multi-stage models. Project page: https://ly-zhu.github.io/V-SlowFast
