# Modality-Independent Teachers Meet Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Event Parser

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [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)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [AudioCLIP: Extending CLIP to Image, Text and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13043/) (2021)
- [Audio-Visual Scene Analysis with Self-Supervised Multisensory Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03641/) (2018)
- [Deep Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02108/) (2018)
- [Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11116/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [Objects that Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06651/) (2017)
- [EPIC-Fusion: Audio-Visual Temporal Binding for Egocentric Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08498/) (2019)
- [Learning to Answer Questions in Dynamic Audio-Visual Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14072/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Unified Multisensory Perception: Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10558/) (2020)
- [SCSampler: Sampling Salient Clips from Video for Efficient Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04289/) (2019)
- [Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09107/) (2019)
- [Learning to Separate Object Sounds by Watching Unlabeled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01665/) (2018)
- [Co-Separating Sounds of Visual Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07750/) (2019)
- [The Conversation: Deep Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04121/) (2018)
- [Look, Listen, and Act: Towards Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11684/) (2019)
- [Pano-AVQA: Grounded Audio-Visual Question Answering on 360^circ Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05122/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Towards Open-Vocabulary Audio-Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11278/) (2024)
- [Label-anticipated Event Disentanglement for Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08126/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Class-aware Semantic Enhancement Network for Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11248/) (2024)
- [CoLeaF: A Contrastive-Collaborative Learning Framework for Weakly Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10690/) (2024)
- [Mettle: Meta-Token Learning for Memory-Efficient Audio-Visual Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23271/) (2025)
- [CLASP: Cross-modal Salient Anchor-based Semantic Propagation for Weakly-supervised Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04566/) (2025)
- [PreFM: Online Audio-Visual Event Parsing via Predictive Future Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23155/) (2025)
- [LINK: Adaptive Modality Interaction for Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20872/) (2024)
- [MUG: Pseudo Labeling Augmented Audio-Visual Mamba Network for Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01384/) (2025)
- [AV-Master: Dual-Path Comprehensive Perception Makes Better Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18346/) (2025)
- [UWAV: Uncertainty-weighted Weakly-supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09615/) (2025)
- [Audit After Segmentation: Reference-Free Mask Quality Assessment for Language-Referred Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03892/) (2026)
- [ESG-Net: Event-Aware Semantic Guided Network for Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09945/) (2025)
- [TEn-CATG:Text-Enriched Audio-Visual Video Parsing with Multi-Scale Category-Aware Temporal Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04086/) (2025)
- [Teacher-Guided Pseudo Supervision and Cross-Modal Alignment for Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14097/) (2025)
- [EAR: Enhancing Uni-Modal Representations for Weakly Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08723/) (2026)
- [TB-AVA: Text as a Semantic Bridge for Audio-Visual Parameter Efficient Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11572/) (2026)
- [SCoPE: Training-Free Audio-Visual Event Perception via Sparse Cross-Modal Prior Exchange](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07923/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-visual learning has been a major pillar of multi-modal machine learning, where the community mostly focused on its modality-aligned setting, i.e., the audio and visual modality are both assumed to signal the prediction target. With the Look, Listen, and Parse dataset (LLP), we investigate the under-explored unaligned setting, where the goal is to recognize audio and visual events in a video with only weak labels observed. Such weak video-level labels only tell what events happen without knowing the modality they are perceived (audio, visual, or both). To enhance learning in this challenging setting, we incorporate large-scale contrastively pre-trained models as the modality teachers. A simple, effective, and generic method, termed Visual-Audio Label Elaboration (VALOR), is innovated to harvest modality labels for the training events. Empirical studies show that the harvested labels significantly improve an attentional baseline by 8.0 in average F-score (Type@AV). Surprisingly, we found that modality-independent teachers outperform their modality-fused counterparts since they are noise-proof from the other potentially unaligned modality. Moreover, our best model achieves the new state-of-the-art on all metrics of LLP by a substantial margin (+5.4 F-score for Type@AV). VALOR is further generalized to Audio-Visual Event Localization and achieves the new state-of-the-art as well. Code is available at: https://github.com/Franklin905/VALOR.