Answering Diverse Questions via Text Attached with Key Audio-Visual Clues

Audio-visual question answering (AVQA) requires reference to video content and auditory information, followed by correlating the question to predict the most precise answer. Although mining deeper layers of audio-visual information to interact with questions facilitates the multimodal fusion process, the redundancy of audio-visual parameters tends to reduce the generalization of the inference engine to multiple question-answer pairs in a single video. Indeed, the natural heterogeneous relationship between audiovisuals and text makes the perfect fusion challenging, to prevent high-level audio-visual semantics from weakening the network's adaptability to diverse question types, we propose a framework for performing mutual correlation distillation (MCD) to aid question inference. MCD is divided into three main steps: 1) firstly, the residual structure is utilized to enhance the audio-visual soft associations based on self-attention, then key local audio-visual features relevant to the question context are captured hierarchically by shared aggregators and coupled in the form of clues with specific question vectors. 2) Secondly, knowledge distillation is enforced to align audio-visual-text pairs in a shared latent space to narrow the cross-modal semantic gap. 3) And finally, the audio-visual dependencies are decoupled by discarding the decision-level integrations. We evaluate the proposed method on two publicly available datasets containing multiple question-and-answer pairs, i.e., Music-AVQA and AVQA. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, and one interesting finding behind is that removing deep audio-visual features during inference can effectively mitigate overfitting. The source code is released at http://github.com/rikeilong/MCD-forAVQA.

CAT: Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Model to Answer Questions in Dynamic Audio-Visual Scenarios

This paper focuses on the challenge of answering questions in scenarios that are composed of rich and complex dynamic audio-visual components. Although existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can respond to audio-visual content, these responses are sometimes ambiguous and fail to describe specific audio-visual events. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the CAT, which enhances MLLM in three ways: 1) besides straightforwardly bridging audio and video, we design a clue aggregator that aggregates question-related clues in dynamic audio-visual scenarios to enrich the detailed knowledge required for large language models. 2) CAT is trained on a mixed multimodal dataset, allowing direct application in audio-visual scenarios. Notably, we collect an audio-visual joint instruction dataset named AVinstruct, to further enhance the capacity of CAT to model cross-semantic correlations. 3) we propose AI-assisted ambiguity-aware direct preference optimization, a strategy specialized in retraining the model to favor the non-ambiguity response and improve the ability to localize specific audio-visual objects. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CAT outperforms existing methods on multimodal tasks, especially in Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) tasks. The codes and the collected instructions are released at https://github.com/rikeilong/Bay-CAT.