Learning to Unify Audio, Visual and Text for Audio-Enhanced Multilingual Visual Answer Localization

The goal of Multilingual Visual Answer Localization (MVAL) is to locate a video segment that answers a given multilingual question. Existing methods either focus solely on visual modality or integrate visual and subtitle modalities. However, these methods neglect the audio modality in videos, consequently leading to incomplete input information and poor performance in the MVAL task. In this paper, we propose a unified Audio-Visual-Textual Span Localization (AVTSL) method that incorporates audio modality to augment both visual and textual representations for the MVAL task. Specifically, we integrate features from three modalities and develop three predictors, each tailored to the unique contributions of the fused modalities: an audio-visual predictor, a visual predictor, and a textual predictor. Each predictor generates predictions based on its respective modality. To maintain consistency across the predicted results, we introduce an Audio-Visual-Textual Consistency module. This module utilizes a Dynamic Triangular Loss (DTL) function, allowing each modality's predictor to dynamically learn from the others. This collaborative learning ensures that the model generates consistent and comprehensive answers. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the audio modality.