# Answering Diverse Questions via Text Attached with Key Audio-Visual Clues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06679 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06679/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [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)
- [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)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [TGIF-QA: Toward Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04497/) (2017)
- [Deep Modular Co-Attention Networks for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10770/) (2019)
- [AudioCLIP: Extending CLIP to Image, Text and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13043/) (2021)
- [MovieQA: Understanding Stories in Movies through Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02902/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [Balanced Multimodal Learning via On-the-fly Gradient Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15332/) (2022)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04856/) (2023)
- [Just Ask: Learning to Answer Questions from Millions of Narrated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00451/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Video Question Answering via Frozen Bidirectional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08155/) (2022)
- [Learning to Answer Questions in Dynamic Audio-Visual Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14072/) (2022)
- [Learning to Localize Sound Source in Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03849/) (2018)
- [MERLOT Reserve: Neural Script Knowledge through Vision and Language and Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02639/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Conditional Relation Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10698/) (2020)
- [Heterogeneous Memory Enhanced Multimodal Attention Model for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04357/) (2019)
- [Unified Multisensory Perception: Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10558/) (2020)
- [Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09107/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Question-Aware Gaussian Experts for Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04459/) (2025)
- [AURA: A Fine-Grained Benchmark and Decomposed Metric for Audio-Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07470/) (2025)
- [Learning Sparsity for Effective and Efficient Music Performance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01319/) (2025)
- [AV-Master: Dual-Path Comprehensive Perception Makes Better Audio-Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18346/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Intelligence in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04045/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-visual question answering (AVQA) requires reference to video content and auditory information, followed by correlating the question to predict the most precise answer. Although mining deeper layers of audio-visual information to interact with questions facilitates the multimodal fusion process, the redundancy of audio-visual parameters tends to reduce the generalization of the inference engine to multiple question-answer pairs in a single video. Indeed, the natural heterogeneous relationship between audiovisuals and text makes the perfect fusion challenging, to prevent high-level audio-visual semantics from weakening the network's adaptability to diverse question types, we propose a framework for performing mutual correlation distillation (MCD) to aid question inference. MCD is divided into three main steps: 1) firstly, the residual structure is utilized to enhance the audio-visual soft associations based on self-attention, then key local audio-visual features relevant to the question context are captured hierarchically by shared aggregators and coupled in the form of clues with specific question vectors. 2) Secondly, knowledge distillation is enforced to align audio-visual-text pairs in a shared latent space to narrow the cross-modal semantic gap. 3) And finally, the audio-visual dependencies are decoupled by discarding the decision-level integrations. We evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available datasets containing multiple question-and-answer pairs, i.e., Music-AVQA and AVQA. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, and one interesting finding behind is that removing deep audio-visual features during inference can effectively mitigate overfitting. The source code is released at http://github.com/rikeilong/MCD-forAVQA.