Semantic Noise Reduction via Teacher-Guided Dual-Path Audio-Visual Representation Learning

Recent advances in audio-visual representation learning have shown the value of combining contrastive alignment with masked reconstruction. However, jointly optimizing these objectives in a single forward pass forces the contrastive branch to rely on randomly visible patches designed for reconstruction rather than cross-modal alignment, introducing semantic noise and optimization interference. We propose TG-DP, a Teacher-Guided Dual-Path framework that decouples reconstruction and alignment into separate optimization paths. By disentangling the masking regimes of the two branches, TG-DP enables the contrastive pathway to use a visibility pattern better suited to cross-modal alignment. A teacher model further provides auxiliary guidance for organizing visible tokens in this branch, helping reduce interference and stabilize cross-modal representation learning. TG-DP achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot retrieval. On AudioSet, it improves R@1 from 35.2\% to 37.4\% for video-to-audio retrieval and from 27.9\% to 37.1\% for audio-to-video retrieval. The learned representations also remain semantically robust, achieving state-of-the-art linear-probe performance on AS20K and VGGSound. Taken together, our results suggest that decoupling multimodal objectives and introducing teacher-guided structure into the contrastive pathway provide an effective framework for improving large-scale audio-visual pretraining. Code is available at https://github.com/wanglg20/TG-DP.

X-VoE: Measuring eXplanatory Violation of Expectation in Physical Events

Intuitive physics is pivotal for human understanding of the physical world, enabling prediction and interpretation of events even in infancy. Nonetheless, replicating this level of intuitive physics in artificial intelligence (AI) remains a formidable challenge. This study introduces X-VoE, a comprehensive benchmark dataset, to assess AI agents' grasp of intuitive physics. Built on the developmental psychology-rooted Violation of Expectation (VoE) paradigm, X-VoE establishes a higher bar for the explanatory capacities of intuitive physics models. Each VoE scenario within X-VoE encompasses three distinct settings, probing models' comprehension of events and their underlying explanations. Beyond model evaluation, we present an explanation-based learning system that captures physics dynamics and infers occluded object states solely from visual sequences, without explicit occlusion labels. Experimental outcomes highlight our model's alignment with human commonsense when tested against X-VoE. A remarkable feature is our model's ability to visually expound VoE events by reconstructing concealed scenes. Concluding, we discuss the findings' implications and outline future research directions. Through X-VoE, we catalyze the advancement of AI endowed with human-like intuitive physics capabilities.