# Hearing and Seeing Through CLIP: A Framework for Self-Supervised Sound Source Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 35 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2025.

## 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 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09058/) (2022)
- [Objects that Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06651/) (2017)
- [Wav2CLIP: Learning Robust Audio Representations From CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11499/) (2021)
- [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)
- [GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11768/) (2024)
- [Learning to Generate Text-grounded Mask for Open-world Semantic Segmentation from Only Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00785/) (2022)
- [Multiple Sound Sources Localization from Coarse to Fine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06355/) (2020)
- [Discriminative Sounding Objects Localization via Self-supervised Audiovisual Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05466/) (2020)
- [Text-Only Training for Image Captioning using Noise-Injected CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00575/) (2022)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Easy Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09324/) (2022)
- [A Closer Look at Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09634/) (2022)
- [Audio-Visual Grouping Network for Sound Localization from Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17056/) (2023)
- [Learning Audio-Visual Source Localization via False Negative Aware Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11302/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Transformation Invariance and Equivariance for Self-supervised Sound Localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12772/) (2022)
- [Unraveling Instance Associations: A Closer Look for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02970/) (2023)
- [Learning Sound Localization Better From Semantically Similar Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03007/) (2022)
- [Learning to Localize Sound Sources in Visual Scenes: Analysis and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09649/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Predictive Learning: A Negative-Free Method for Sound Source Localization in Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13412/) (2022)
- [Sound Source Localization is All about Cross-Modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10724/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Sound Localization via Iterative Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00315/) (2021)
- [AVE-CLIP: AudioCLIP-based Multi-window Temporal Transformer for Audio Visual Event Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05060/) (2022)
- [CLIPSep: Learning Text-queried Sound Separation with Noisy Unlabeled Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07065/) (2022)
- [Language-Guided Audio-Visual Source Separation via Trimodal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16342/) (2023)
- [T-VSL: Text-Guided Visual Sound Source Localization in Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01751/) (2024)
- [Separating the "Chirp" from the "Chat": Self-supervised Visual Grounding of Sound and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05629/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SpatialV2A: Visual-Guided High-fidelity Spatial Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15017/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale vision-language models demonstrate strong multimodal alignment and generalization across diverse tasks. Among them, CLIP stands out as one of the most successful approaches. In this work, we extend the application of CLIP to sound source localization, proposing a self-supervised method operates without explicit text input. We introduce a framework that maps audios into tokens compatible with CLIP's text encoder, producing audio-driven embeddings. These embeddings are used to generate sounding region masks, from which visual features are extracted and aligned with the audio embeddings through a contrastive audio-visual correspondence objective. Our findings show that alignment knowledge of pre-trained multimodal foundation model enables our method to generate more complete and compact localization for sounding objects. We further propose an LLM-guided extension that distills object-aware audio-visual scene understanding into the model during training to enhance alignment. Extensive experiments across five diverse tasks demonstrate that our method, in all variants, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and achieves strong generalization in zero-shot settings.