# What's Making That Sound Right Now? Video-centric Audio-Visual Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04667 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04667/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [SoundNet: Learning Sound Representations from Unlabeled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09001/) (2016)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02634/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Hard Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02691/) (2021)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05042/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Learning Representations from Audio-Visual Spatial Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01819/) (2020)
- [Real-Time Flying Object Detection with YOLOv8](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09972/) (2023)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Easy Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09324/) (2022)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation with Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13190/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09634/) (2022)
- [Mix and Localize: Localizing Sound Sources in Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15058/) (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)
- [Egocentric Audio-Visual Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13471/) (2023)
- [Sound Source Localization is All about Cross-Modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10724/) (2023)
- [Can CLIP Help Sound Source Localization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04066/) (2023)
- [Learning to Visually Localize Sound Sources from Mixtures without Prior Source Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17420/) (2024)
- [Dual Mean-Teacher: An Unbiased Semi-Supervised Framework for Audio-Visual Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03145/) (2024)
- [Aligning Sight and Sound: Advanced Sound Source Localization Through Audio-Visual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13676/) (2024)

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

- [Toward Structural Multimodal Representations: Specialization, Selection, and Sparsification via Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03348/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Spatial Grounding in Large Audio-Visual Retrieval models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24786/) (2026)
- [Hear to See: Discerning Stateful Listening for Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03264/) (2026)
- [SlotAVS: Object-Centric Audio-Visual Segmentation via Bi-Modal Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15764/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-Visual Localization (AVL) aims to identify sound-emitting sources within a visual scene. However, existing studies focus on image-level audio-visual associations, failing to capture temporal dynamics. Moreover, they assume simplified scenarios where sound sources are always visible and involve only a single object. To address these limitations, we propose AVATAR, a video-centric AVL benchmark that incorporates high-resolution temporal information. AVATAR introduces four distinct scenarios -- Single-sound, Mixed-sound, Multi-entity, and Off-screen -- enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of AVL models. Additionally, we present TAVLO, a novel video-centric AVL model that explicitly integrates temporal information. Experimental results show that conventional methods struggle to track temporal variations due to their reliance on global audio features and frame-level mappings. In contrast, TAVLO achieves robust and precise audio-visual alignment by leveraging high-resolution temporal modeling. Our work empirically demonstrates the importance of temporal dynamics in AVL and establishes a new standard for video-centric audio-visual localization.