# Aligning Audio-Visual Joint Representations with an Agentic Workflow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [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)
- [X-CLIP: End-to-End Multi-grained Contrastive Learning for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07285/) (2022)
- [Masked Autoencoders that Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06405/) (2022)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [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)
- [VideoAgent: A Memory-augmented Multimodal Agent for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11481/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05042/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Contrastive Audio-Visual Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07839/) (2022)
- [Multiple Sound Sources Localization from Coarse to Fine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06355/) (2020)
- [Music Gesture for Visual Sound Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09476/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Sounding Objects Localization via Self-supervised Audiovisual Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05466/) (2020)
- [Learning Representations from Audio-Visual Spatial Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01819/) (2020)
- [SoundSpaces 2.0: A Simulation Platform for Visual-Acoustic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08312/) (2022)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [From Waveforms to Pixels: A Survey on Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03724/) (2025)
- [VAInpaint: Zero-Shot Video-Audio inpainting framework with LLMs-driven Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17022/) (2025)
- [Foley-Flow: Coordinated Video-to-Audio Generation with Masked Audio-Visual Alignment and Dynamic Conditional Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08126/) (2026)
- [Distorted or Fabricated? A Survey on Hallucination in Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12944/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual content and accompanied audio signals naturally formulate a joint representation to improve audio-visual (AV) related applications. While studies develop various AV representation learning frameworks, the importance of AV data alignment is usually undermined for achieving high-quality representation. We observe that an audio signal may contain background noise interference. Also, non-synchronization may appear between audio and video streams. These non-strict data alignment limits representation quality and downgrade application performance. In this paper, we propose to improve AV joint representations from a data-centric perspective by aligning audio signals to visual data. Our alignment is conducted in an agentic workflow controlled by an LLM-based assistant named AVAgent. For each input AV data pair, our AVAgent uses a multi-modal LLM to convert audio and visual data into language descriptions separately (i.e., tool use). Then, AVAgent reasons whether this paired data is aligned well and plans to edit the audio signal if needed (i.e., planning). The audio editing is executed by predefined actions that filter noise or augment data. Moreover, we use a VLM to evaluate how modified audio signals match the visual content and provide feedback to AVAgent (i.e., reflection). The tool use, planning, and reflection steps operate cyclically to become an agentic workflow where audio signals are gradually aligned to visual content. To this end, existing methods can directly leverage the aligned AV data via our agentic workflow to improve AV joint representations. The experimental results comprehensively demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed approach against previous baselines in diverse downstream tasks.