# Aligning Sight and Sound: Advanced Sound Source Localization Through Audio-Visual Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13676 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13676/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [Look, Listen and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08168/) (2017)
- [Deep metric learning using Triplet network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6622/) (2014)
- [Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05208/) (2021)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [Objects that Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06651/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Self-supervised Co-training for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09709/) (2020)
- [Wav2CLIP: Learning Robust Audio Representations From CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11499/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval with Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15247/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Pic2Word: Mapping Pictures to Words for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03084/) (2023)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05042/) (2022)
- [The Sound of Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05979/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Sound2Vision: Generating Diverse Visuals from Audio through Cross-Modal Latent Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06209/) (2024)
- [A Critical Assessment of Visual Sound Source Localization Models Including Negative Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01020/) (2024)
- [What's Making That Sound Right Now? Video-centric Audio-Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04667/) (2025)
- [From Waveforms to Pixels: A Survey on Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03724/) (2025)
- [Hearing and Seeing Through CLIP: A Framework for Self-Supervised Sound Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05343/) (2025)
- [Bridging Audio and Vision: Zero-Shot Audiovisual Segmentation by Connecting Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06537/) (2025)
- [Learning from Silence and Noise for Visual Sound Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21761/) (2025)
- [Acoustic Field Video for Multimodal Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17123/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent studies on learning-based sound source localization have mainly focused on the localization performance perspective. However, prior work and existing benchmarks overlook a crucial aspect: cross-modal interaction, which is essential for interactive sound source localization. Cross-modal interaction is vital for understanding semantically matched or mismatched audio-visual events, such as silent objects or off-screen sounds. In this paper, we first comprehensively examine the cross-modal interaction of existing methods, benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and cross-modal understanding tasks. Then, we identify the limitations of previous studies and make several contributions to overcome the limitations. First, we introduce a new synthetic benchmark for interactive sound source localization. Second, we introduce new evaluation metrics to rigorously assess sound source localization methods, focusing on accurately evaluating both localization performance and cross-modal interaction ability. Third, we propose a learning framework with a cross-modal alignment strategy to enhance cross-modal interaction. Lastly, we evaluate both interactive sound source localization and auxiliary cross-modal retrieval tasks together to thoroughly assess cross-modal interaction capabilities and benchmark competing methods. Our new benchmarks and evaluation metrics reveal previously overlooked issues in sound source localization studies. Our proposed novel method, with enhanced cross-modal alignment, shows superior sound source localization performance. This work provides the most comprehensive analysis of sound source localization to date, with extensive validation of competing methods on both existing and new benchmarks using new and standard evaluation metrics.