# Annotation-free Audio-Visual Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11019 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11019/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 89 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Ref-AVS: Refer and Segment Objects in Audio-Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10957/) (2024)
- [FOLDER: Accelerating Multi-modal Large Language Models with Enhanced Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02430/) (2025)
- [Progressive Spatio-temporal Perception for Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05421/) (2023)
- [AttrSeg: Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Attribute Decomposition-Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00096/) (2023)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation via Unlabeled Frame Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11074/) (2024)
- [Meerkat: Audio-Visual Large Language Model for Grounding in Space and Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01851/) (2024)
- [Can Textual Semantics Mitigate Sounding Object Segmentation Preference?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10947/) (2024)
- [Turbo: Informativity-Driven Acceleration Plug-In for Vision-Language Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11717/) (2024)
- [Advancing Myopia To Holism: Fully Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00440/) (2024)
- [Turbo: Informativity-Driven Acceleration Plug-In for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07408/) (2023)
- [CPM: Class-conditional Prompting Machine for Audio-visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05358/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Derivation and Elimination: Audio Visual Segmentation with Enhanced Audio Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12840/) (2025)
- [DENOISER: Rethinking the Robustness for Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14890/) (2024)
- [Robust Audio-Visual Segmentation via Audio-Guided Visual Convergent Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12847/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Audio-Visual Segmentation with Modality Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14203/) (2024)
- [R2-Bench: Benchmarking the Robustness of Referring Perception Models under Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04924/) (2024)
- [Do Audio-Visual Segmentation Models Truly Segment Sounding Objects?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00358/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Foundation models for Unsupervised Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06728/) (2023)
- [Extending Segment Anything Model into Auditory and Temporal Dimensions for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06163/) (2024)
- [Implicit Counterfactual Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20740/) (2025)
- [Contrast-Unity for Partially-Supervised Temporal Sentence Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12917/) (2025)
- [TAViS: Text-bridged Audio-Visual Segmentation with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11436/) (2025)
- [MoMa: Modulating Mamba for Adapting Image Foundation Models to Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23283/) (2025)
- [Learning What To Hear: Boosting Sound-Source Association For Robust Audiovisual Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22740/) (2025)
- [From Waveforms to Pixels: A Survey on Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03724/) (2025)
- [SaFiRe: Saccade-Fixation Reiteration with Mamba for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10160/) (2025)
- [Explore More, Learn Better: Parallel MLLM Embeddings under Mutual Information Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01588/) (2025)
- [GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23906/) (2026)
- [3D Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02236/) (2024)
- [Squeeze Out Tokens from Sample for Finer-Grained Data Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14559/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The objective of Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) is to localise the sounding objects within visual scenes by accurately predicting pixel-wise segmentation masks. To tackle the task, it involves a comprehensive consideration of both the data and model aspects. In this paper, first, we initiate a novel pipeline for generating artificial data for the AVS task without extra manual annotations. We leverage existing image segmentation and audio datasets and match the image-mask pairs with its corresponding audio samples using category labels in segmentation datasets, that allows us to effortlessly compose (image, audio, mask) triplets for training AVS models. The pipeline is annotation-free and scalable to cover a large number of categories. Additionally, we introduce a lightweight model SAMA-AVS which adapts the pre-trained segment anything model~(SAM) to the AVS task. By introducing only a small number of trainable parameters with adapters, the proposed model can effectively achieve adequate audio-visual fusion and interaction in the encoding stage with vast majority of parameters fixed. We conduct extensive experiments, and the results show our proposed model remarkably surpasses other competing methods. Moreover, by using the proposed model pretrained with our synthetic data, the performance on real AVSBench data is further improved, achieving 83.17 mIoU on S4 subset and 66.95 mIoU on MS3 set. The project page is https://jinxiang-liu.github.io/anno-free-AVS/.