# Hearing from Silence: Reasoning Audio Descriptions from Silent Videos via Vision-Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13062 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13062/

## 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 27 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 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, 27 of 27)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13601/) (2024)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [Oryx MLLM: On-Demand Spatial-Temporal Understanding at Arbitrary Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12961/) (2024)
- [MiniGPT4-Video: Advancing Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding with Interleaved Visual-Textual Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03413/) (2024)
- [FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01494/) (2024)
- [Streaming Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01297/) (2024)
- [Diverse and Aligned Audio-to-Video Generation via Text-to-Video Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16429/) (2023)
- [V2A-Mapper: A Lightweight Solution for Vision-to-Audio Generation by Connecting Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09300/) (2023)
- [Read, Watch and Scream! Sound Generation from Text and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05551/) (2024)
- [FoleyGen: Visually-Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10537/) (2023)
- [Text-to-Audio Generation Synchronized with Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07938/) (2024)
- [Video-to-Audio Generation with Hidden Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07464/) (2024)
- [STA-V2A: Video-to-Audio Generation with Semantic and Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08601/) (2024)
- [CoNeTTE: An efficient Audio Captioning system leveraging multiple datasets with Task Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00454/) (2023)
- [LAVCap: LLM-based Audio-Visual Captioning using Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09291/) (2025)
- [AVCap: Leveraging Audio-Visual Features as Text Tokens for Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07801/) (2024)

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

- [SightSound-R1: Cross-Modal Reasoning Distillation from Vision to Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15661/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans can intuitively infer sounds from silent videos, but whether multimodal large language models can perform modal-mismatch reasoning without accessing target modalities remains relatively unexplored. Current text-assisted-video-to-audio (VT2A) methods excel in video foley tasks but struggle to acquire audio descriptions during inference. We introduce the task of Reasoning Audio Descriptions from Silent Videos (SVAD) to address this challenge and investigate vision-language models' (VLMs) capabilities on this task. To further enhance the VLMs' reasoning capacity for the SVAD task, we construct a CoT-AudioCaps dataset and propose a Chain-of-Thought-based supervised fine-tuning strategy. Experiments on SVAD and subsequent VT2A tasks demonstrate our method's effectiveness in two key aspects: significantly improving VLMs' modal-mismatch reasoning for SVAD and effectively addressing the challenge of acquiring audio descriptions during VT2A inference.