# Exploring the Role of Audio in Video Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12559/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01778/) (2021)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [VATT: Transformers for Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning from Raw Video, Audio and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11178/) (2021)
- [VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03493/) (2019)
- [Attention Bottlenecks for Multimodal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00135/) (2021)
- [Clotho: An Audio Captioning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09387/) (2019)
- [What Makes Training Multi-Modal Classification Networks Hard?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12681/) (2019)

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

- [Integrating Video and Text: A Balanced Approach to Multimodal Summary Generation and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06594/) (2025)
- [Minimal Clips, Maximum Salience: Long Video Summarization via Key Moment Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11399/) (2025)
- [AVCap: Reinforcing Audio-Video Joint Caption with Detail-Aware Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06930/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent focus in video captioning has been on designing architectures that can consume both video and text modalities, and using large-scale video datasets with text transcripts for pre-training, such as HowTo100M. Though these approaches have achieved significant improvement, the audio modality is often ignored in video captioning. In this work, we present an audio-visual framework, which aims to fully exploit the potential of the audio modality for captioning. Instead of relying on text transcripts extracted via automatic speech recognition (ASR), we argue that learning with raw audio signals can be more beneficial, as audio has additional information including acoustic events, speaker identity, etc. Our contributions are twofold. First, we observed that the model overspecializes to the audio modality when pre-training with both video and audio modality, since the ground truth (i.e., text transcripts) can be solely predicted using audio. We proposed a Modality Balanced Pre-training (MBP) loss to mitigate this issue and significantly improve the performance on downstream tasks. Second, we slice and dice different design choices of the cross-modal module, which may become an information bottleneck and generate inferior results. We proposed new local-global fusion mechanisms to improve information exchange across audio and video. We demonstrate significant improvements by leveraging the audio modality on four datasets, and even outperform the state of the art on some metrics without relying on the text modality as the input.