# BAVS: Bootstrapping Audio-Visual Segmentation by Integrating Foundation Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10175 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10175/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09058/) (2022)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [Learning to Localize Sound Source in Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03849/) (2018)
- [One Transformer Fits All Distributions in Multi-Modal Diffusion at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06555/) (2023)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Hard Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02691/) (2021)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05042/) (2022)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Easy Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09324/) (2022)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation with Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13190/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09634/) (2022)
- [Positive Sample Propagation along the Audio-Visual Event Line](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00239/) (2021)
- [Cyclic Co-Learning of Sounding Object Visual Grounding and Sound Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02026/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Positive Sample Propagation along the Audio-Visual Event Line](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09980/) (2022)
- [EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18891/) (2023)
- [MP-Former: Mask-Piloted Transformer for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07336/) (2023)
- [Learning Sound Localization Better From Semantically Similar Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03007/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Predictive Learning: A Negative-Free Method for Sound Source Localization in Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13412/) (2022)
- [Visual Sound Localization in the Wild by Cross-Modal Interference Erasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06406/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Cooperation Does Matter: Exploring Multi-Order Bilateral Relations for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06462/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00265/) (2025)
- [Crab: A Unified Audio-Visual Scene Understanding Model with Explicit Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13068/) (2025)
- [AVS-Mamba: Exploring Temporal and Multi-modal Mamba for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07810/) (2025)
- [Can Textual Semantics Mitigate Sounding Object Segmentation Preference?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10947/) (2024)
- [CPM: Class-conditional Prompting Machine for Audio-visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05358/) (2024)
- [Locality-aware Cross-modal Correspondence Learning for Dense Audio-Visual Events Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07967/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Derivation and Elimination: Audio Visual Segmentation with Enhanced Audio Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12840/) (2025)
- [Robust Audio-Visual Segmentation via Audio-Guided Visual Convergent Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12847/) (2025)
- [Bootstrapping Audio-Visual Segmentation by Strengthening Audio Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02327/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Audio-Visual Segmentation with Modality Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14203/) (2024)
- [Affective Behaviour Analysis via Progressive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16945/) (2024)
- [AVESFormer: Efficient Transformer Design for Real-Time Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01708/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Audio-Visual Segmentation with Vision-Centric Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23623/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Foundation models for Unsupervised Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06728/) (2023)
- [Implicit Counterfactual Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20740/) (2025)
- [Complementary and Contrastive Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10051/) (2025)
- [From Waveforms to Pixels: A Survey on Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03724/) (2025)
- [Delayed Bidirectional Alignment via Disentangled Audio Semantics for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20117/) (2025)
- [3D Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02236/) (2024)
- [AuralSAM2: Enabling SAM2 Hear Through Pyramid Audio-Visual Feature Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01015/) (2025)
- [Bridging Audio and Vision: Zero-Shot Audiovisual Segmentation by Connecting Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06537/) (2025)
- [TEn-CATG:Text-Enriched Audio-Visual Video Parsing with Multi-Scale Category-Aware Temporal Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04086/) (2025)
- [Layover or Direct Flight: Rethinking Audio-Guided Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22025/) (2025)
- [SeaVIS: Sound-Enhanced Association for Online Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01431/) (2026)
- [Selective Noise Suppression and Discriminative Mutual Interaction for Robust Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14203/) (2026)
- [7ABAW-Compound Expression Recognition via Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07969/) (2025)
- [AV-Unified: A Unified Framework for Audio-visual Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06530/) (2026)
- [RA-SSU: Towards Fine-Grained Audio-Visual Learning with Region-Aware Sound Source Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09809/) (2026)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation via Depth-Guided Collaborative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16285/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given an audio-visual pair, audio-visual segmentation (AVS) aims to locate sounding sources by predicting pixel-wise maps. Previous methods assume that each sound component in an audio signal always has a visual counterpart in the image. However, this assumption overlooks that off-screen sounds and background noise often contaminate the audio recordings in real-world scenarios. They impose significant challenges on building a consistent semantic mapping between audio and visual signals for AVS models and thus impede precise sound localization. In this work, we propose a two-stage bootstrapping audio-visual segmentation framework by incorporating multi-modal foundation knowledge. In a nutshell, our BAVS is designed to eliminate the interference of background noise or off-screen sounds in segmentation by establishing the audio-visual correspondences in an explicit manner. In the first stage, we employ a segmentation model to localize potential sounding objects from visual data without being affected by contaminated audio signals. Meanwhile, we also utilize a foundation audio classification model to discern audio semantics. Considering the audio tags provided by the audio foundation model are noisy, associating object masks with audio tags is not trivial. Thus, in the second stage, we develop an audio-visual semantic integration strategy (AVIS) to localize the authentic-sounding objects. Here, we construct an audio-visual tree based on the hierarchical correspondence between sounds and object categories. We then examine the label concurrency between the localized objects and classified audio tags by tracing the audio-visual tree. With AVIS, we can effectively segment real-sounding objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method on AVS datasets, particularly in scenarios involving background noise. Our project website is https://yenanliu.github.io/AVSS.github.io/.