# A Unified Audio-Visual Learning Framework for Localization, Separation, and Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19458 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19458/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [EPIC-Fusion: Audio-Visual Temporal Binding for Egocentric Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08498/) (2019)
- [Audio-Visual Instance Discrimination with Cross-Modal Agreement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12943/) (2020)
- [Learning to Localize Sound Source in Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03849/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Audio-Visual Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04237/) (2020)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Hard Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02691/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multiple Sound Sources Localization from Coarse to Fine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06355/) (2020)
- [Learning to Separate Object Sounds by Watching Unlabeled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01665/) (2018)
- [Music Gesture for Visual Sound Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09476/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Sounding Objects Localization via Self-supervised Audiovisual Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05466/) (2020)
- [Learning Representations from Audio-Visual Spatial Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01819/) (2020)
- [SoundSpaces 2.0: A Simulation Platform for Visual-Acoustic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08312/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Generation of Spatial Audio for 360 Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02587/) (2018)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Easy Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09324/) (2022)
- [Robust Audio-Visual Instance Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15916/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09634/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Audio-Visual Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11073/) (2023)
- [Text-to-Audio Generation Synchronized with Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07938/) (2024)
- [Unveiling the Power of Audio-Visual Early Fusion Transformers with Dense Interactions through Masked Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01017/) (2023)
- [Class-Incremental Grouping Network for Continual Audio-Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05281/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15080/) (2023)
- [Siamese Vision Transformers are Scalable Audio-visual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19638/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Perception for Unified Visual Multi-modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06583/) (2025)
- [Audio-visual Generalized Zero-shot Learning the Easy Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13095/) (2024)
- [DiffGAP: A Lightweight Diffusion Module in Contrastive Space for Bridging Cross-Model Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12131/) (2025)
- [Semantic Grouping Network for Audio Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03736/) (2024)
- [Aligning Audio-Visual Joint Representations with an Agentic Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23230/) (2024)
- [PreFM: Online Audio-Visual Event Parsing via Predictive Future Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23155/) (2025)
- [Multi-scale Multi-instance Visual Sound Localization and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00486/) (2024)
- [Unified Video-Language Pre-training with Synchronized Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07202/) (2024)
- [Model-Driven Deep Neural Network for Enhanced AoA Estimation Using 5G gNB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00009/) (2024)
- [Prior-free Balanced Replay: Uncertainty-guided Reservoir Sampling for Long-Tailed Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14976/) (2024)
- [ESG-Net: Event-Aware Semantic Guided Network for Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09945/) (2025)
- [Foley-Flow: Coordinated Video-to-Audio Generation with Masked Audio-Visual Alignment and Dynamic Conditional Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08126/) (2026)
- [Global-Local Distillation Network-Based Audio-Visual Speaker Tracking with Incomplete Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14585/) (2024)
- [SoundLoc3D: Invisible 3D Sound Source Localization and Classification Using a Multimodal RGB-D Acoustic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16861/) (2024)
- [AV-Unified: A Unified Framework for Audio-visual Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06530/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to accurately recognize, localize and separate sound sources is fundamental to any audio-visual perception task. Historically, these abilities were tackled separately, with several methods developed independently for each task. However, given the interconnected nature of source localization, separation, and recognition, independent models are likely to yield suboptimal performance as they fail to capture the interdependence between these tasks. To address this problem, we propose a unified audio-visual learning framework (dubbed OneAVM) that integrates audio and visual cues for joint localization, separation, and recognition. OneAVM comprises a shared audio-visual encoder and task-specific decoders trained with three objectives. The first objective aligns audio and visual representations through a localized audio-visual correspondence loss. The second tackles visual source separation using a traditional mix-and-separate framework. Finally, the third objective reinforces visual feature separation and localization by mixing images in pixel space and aligning their representations with those of all corresponding sound sources. Extensive experiments on MUSIC, VGG-Instruments, VGG-Music, and VGGSound datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of OneAVM for all three tasks, audio-visual source localization, separation, and nearest neighbor recognition, and empirically demonstrate a strong positive transfer between them.