Multi-Modal Scene Graph with Kolmogorov-Arnold Experts for Audio-Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Scene Graph with Kolmogorov-Arnold Expert Network for Audio-Visual Question Answering (SHRIKE). The task aims to mimic human reasoning by extracting and fusing information from audio-visual scenes, with the main challenge being the identification of question-relevant cues from complex audio-visual content. Existing methods fail to capture the structural information within videos and suffer from insufficient fine-grained modeling of multi-modal features. To address these issues, we are the first to introduce a new multi-modal scene graph that explicitly models objects and their relationships as a visually grounded, structured representation of the audio-visual scene, yielding 461,292 relation triplets over 9,288 musical performance videos. Furthermore, we design a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN)-based Mixture of Experts (MoE) to enhance the expressive power of the temporal integration stage. This enables more fine-grained modeling of cross-modal interactions within the question-aware fused audio-visual representation, capturing richer and more nuanced patterns and improving temporal reasoning performance. We evaluate the model on the established MUSIC-AVQA and MUSIC-AVQA v2 benchmarks, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 78.14% average accuracy on MUSIC-AVQA, surpassing the previous best method QA-TIGER and ranking first under all four configurations of MUSIC-AVQA v2.0. Code and model checkpoints will be publicly released at https://github.com/feel12348/SHRIKE.