# Semantic Grouping Network for Audio Source Separation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03736 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03736/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Look, Listen and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08168/) (2017)
- [SDR - half-baked or well done?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02508/) (2018)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Deep clustering: Discriminative embeddings for segmentation and separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04306/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party: A Speaker-Independent Audio-Visual Model for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03619/) (2018)
- [The Sound of Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05979/) (2019)
- [Unified Multisensory Perception: Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10558/) (2020)
- [Wave-U-Net: A Multi-Scale Neural Network for End-to-End Audio Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03185/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning Representations from Audio-Visual Spatial Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01819/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Dual-modality seq2seq network for audio-visual event localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07473/) (2019)

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

- [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)
- [Aligning Audio-Visual Joint Representations with an Agentic Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23230/) (2024)
- [Multi-scale Multi-instance Visual Sound Localization and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00486/) (2024)
- [Foley-Flow: Coordinated Video-to-Audio Generation with Masked Audio-Visual Alignment and Dynamic Conditional Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08126/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, audio-visual separation approaches have taken advantage of the natural synchronization between the two modalities to boost audio source separation performance. They extracted high-level semantics from visual inputs as the guidance to help disentangle sound representation for individual sources. Can we directly learn to disentangle the individual semantics from the sound itself? The dilemma is that multiple sound sources are mixed together in the original space. To tackle the difficulty, in this paper, we present a novel Semantic Grouping Network, termed as SGN, that can directly disentangle sound representations and extract high-level semantic information for each source from input audio mixture. Specifically, SGN aggregates category-wise source features through learnable class tokens of sounds. Then, the aggregated semantic features can be used as the guidance to separate the corresponding audio sources from the mixture. We conducted extensive experiments on music-only and universal sound separation benchmarks: MUSIC, FUSS, MUSDB18, and VGG-Sound. The results demonstrate that our SGN significantly outperforms previous audio-only methods and audio-visual models without utilizing additional visual cues.