# Looking Similar, Sounding Different: Leveraging Counterfactual Cross-Modal Pairs for Audiovisual Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05600 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05600/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 99 of its 140 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 99)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Multimodal Machine Learning: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09406/) (2017)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Speech Commands: A Dataset for Limited-Vocabulary Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03209/) (2018)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ANIM-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Automated End-To-End Dubbing of Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05314/) (2024)
- [Implicit Counterfactual Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20740/) (2025)
- [When Vision Speaks for Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16403/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audiovisual representation learning typically relies on the correspondence between sight and sound. However, there are often multiple audio tracks that can correspond with a visual scene. Consider, for example, different conversations on the same crowded street. The effect of such counterfactual pairs on audiovisual representation learning has not been previously explored. To investigate this, we use dubbed versions of movies and television shows to augment cross-modal contrastive learning. Our approach learns to represent alternate audio tracks, differing only in speech, similarly to the same video. Our results, from a comprehensive set of experiments investigating different training strategies, show this general approach improves performance on a range of downstream auditory and audiovisual tasks, without majorly affecting linguistic task performance overall. These findings highlight the importance of considering speech variation when learning scene-level audiovisual correspondences and suggest that dubbed audio can be a useful augmentation technique for training audiovisual models toward more robust performance on diverse downstream tasks.