# SelectTSL: Prompt-Guided Selective Target Sound Localization in Complex Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02343 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02343/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [Deep Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02108/) (2018)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [Dual-path RNN: efficient long sequence modeling for time-domain single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06379/) (2019)
- [WHAM!: Extending Speech Separation to Noisy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01160/) (2019)
- [The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge: Datasets, Subjective Testing Framework, and Challenge Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13981/) (2020)
- [Sound Event Localization and Detection of Overlapping Sources Using Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00129/) (2018)
- [VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04826/) (2018)
- [TF-GridNet: Integrating Full- and Sub-Band Modeling for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12433/) (2022)
- [gpuRIR: A Python Library for Room Impulse Response Simulation with GPU Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11359/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Sound Source Localization with Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03465/) (2021)
- [Separate What You Describe: Language-Queried Audio Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15147/) (2022)
- [Separate Anything You Describe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05037/) (2023)
- [Learning to Localize Sound Sources in Visual Scenes: Analysis and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09649/) (2019)
- [Overview and Evaluation of Sound Event Localization and Detection in DCASE 2019](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02792/) (2020)
- [SpEx: Multi-Scale Time Domain Speaker Extraction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08326/) (2020)
- [Zero-shot Audio Source Separation through Query-based Learning from Weakly-labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07891/) (2021)
- [ACCDOA: Activity-Coupled Cartesian Direction of Arrival Representation for Sound Event Localization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15306/) (2020)
- [An Improved Event-Independent Network for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13092/) (2020)
- [Multi-ACCDOA: Localizing and Detecting Overlapping Sounds from the Same Class with Auxiliary Duplicating Permutation Invariant Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07124/) (2021)
- [CLIPSep: Learning Text-queried Sound Separation with Noisy Unlabeled Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07065/) (2022)
- [A Dataset of Reverberant Spatial Sound Scenes with Moving Sources for Sound Event Localization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01919/) (2020)
- [A metric on the space of finite sets of trajectories for evaluation of multi-target tracking algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01177/) (2016)
- [STARSS22: A dataset of spatial recordings of real scenes with spatiotemporal annotations of sound events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01948/) (2022)
- [SALSA: Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram Features for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00275/) (2021)
- [USEV: Universal Speaker Extraction with Visual Cue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14831/) (2021)
- [Multi-Speaker DOA Estimation Using Deep Convolutional Networks Trained with Noise Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11722/) (2018)

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

- [SAIL: Spatial Audio Intelligence with Large Language Models via Disentangled Acoustic-Spatial Encoding and Dual-Stream Q-Former](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34347/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans can selectively attend to a target sound and estimate its direction in complex scenarios, whereas such selective localization remains challenging for current deep learning-based systems. Sound source localization (SSL) has achieved remarkable success with deep learning, yet most methods localize all active sources without selectivity. Conversely, target sound extraction (TSE) extracts sources using multimodal prompts but typically fails to preserve the multichannel spatial information required for accurate localization. To bridge this gap, we formulate the task of prompt-guided selective target sound localization and propose SelectTSL, an end-to-end architecture that localizes only the user-specified target in multi-source acoustic scenes. Specifically, we design a target-aware selective localization strategy that employs a Prompt-Guided Selective Attention Module (PGSA) to generate prompt-informed embeddings. These embeddings guide an inter-channel phase difference (IPD) enhancer to refine raw phase cues, fusing with target magnitudes to jointly estimate direction of arrival (DoA) and target-source cardinality, i.e., the number of target sound sources. This coupled design effectively focuses on the user-specified target spatial cues for selective localization and also handles time-varying numbers of target sources. Extensive experiments on both synthetic data and real-world recordings demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms other baselines and exhibits robust generalization to real acoustic environments.