# Meerkat: Audio-Visual Large Language Model for Grounding in Space and Time

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01851 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01851/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 98 of its 120 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 98)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [EarthDial: Turning Multi-sensory Earth Observations to Interactive Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15190/) (2024)
- [Tell What You Hear From What You See -- Video to Audio Generation Through Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05679/) (2024)
- [AVCD: Mitigating Hallucinations in Audio-Visual Large Language Models through Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20862/) (2025)
- [AVTrustBench: Assessing and Enhancing Reliability and Robustness in Audio-Visual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02135/) (2025)
- [Crab: A Unified Audio-Visual Scene Understanding Model with Explicit Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13068/) (2025)
- [AV-Reasoner: Improving and Benchmarking Clue-Grounded Audio-Visual Counting for MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05328/) (2025)
- [MAGNET: A Multi-agent Framework for Finding Audio-Visual Needles by Reasoning over Multi-Video Haystacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07016/) (2025)
- [Aligned Better, Listen Better for Audio-Visual Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02061/) (2025)
- [Fork-Merge Decoding: Enhancing Multimodal Understanding in Audio-Visual Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20873/) (2025)
- [Connector-S: A Survey of Connectors in Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11453/) (2025)
- [FastAV: Efficient Token Pruning for Audio-Visual Large Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13143/) (2026)
- [DAVE: Diagnostic benchmark for Audio Visual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09321/) (2025)
- [EgoAdapt: Adaptive Multisensory Distillation and Policy Learning for Efficient Egocentric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21080/) (2025)
- [AMUSE: Audio-Visual Benchmark and Alignment Framework for Agentic Multi-Speaker Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16250/) (2025)
- [SonoWorld: From One Image to a 3D Audio-Visual Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28757/) (2026)
- [Keep What Audio Cannot Say: Context-Preserving Token Pruning for Omni-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11605/) (2026)
- [Quality Over Quantity? LLM-Based Curation for a Data-Efficient Audio-Video Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09205/) (2025)
- [Agentic Design Review System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10745/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Flamingo: Open Audio-Visual Intelligence for Long and Complex Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16107/) (2026)
- [TACO: Training-free Sound Prompted Segmentation via Semantically Constrained Audio-visual CO-factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01488/) (2024)
- [TEn-CATG:Text-Enriched Audio-Visual Video Parsing with Multi-Scale Category-Aware Temporal Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04086/) (2025)
- [Crab+: A Scalable and Unified Audio-Visual Scene Understanding Model with Explicit Cooperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04128/) (2026)
- [Who Says What: Symbolic Trimodal Binding Mechanisms in Audio-Visual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31193/) (2026)
- [AV-Unified: A Unified Framework for Audio-visual Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06530/) (2026)
- [Through the PRISM: Principle-Aware, Interpretable, and Multi-Scale Evaluation of Visual Designs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00592/) (2026)
- [Qwen-MusicAVQA-7B: A Multimodal Model for Music Audio-Visual QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11329/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Leveraging Large Language Models' remarkable proficiency in text-based tasks, recent works on Multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) extend them to other modalities like vision and audio. However, the progress in these directions has been mostly focused on tasks that only require a coarse-grained understanding of the audio-visual semantics. We present Meerkat, an audio-visual LLM equipped with a fine-grained understanding of image and audio both spatially and temporally. With a new modality alignment module based on optimal transport and a cross-attention module that enforces audio-visual consistency, Meerkat can tackle challenging tasks such as audio referred image grounding, image guided audio temporal localization, and audio-visual fact-checking. Moreover, we carefully curate a large dataset AVFIT that comprises 3M instruction tuning samples collected from open-source datasets, and introduce MeerkatBench that unifies five challenging audio-visual tasks. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on all these downstream tasks with a relative improvement of up to 37.12%.