See & Sniff: Learning Visuo-Olfactory Representations

While modern multimodal models integrate vision with language, audio, or touch, olfaction remains largely unexplored due to the lack of paired visuo-olfactory data. We introduce SmellNet-V, a scalable visuo-olfactory dataset built on the insight that odor identity is largely invariant to visual transformations within a semantic category. This allows us to synthetically pair smell-only samples with semantically aligned in-the-wild web images, converting a unimodal olfactory dataset into a cross-modal benchmark without costly co-collection. Building on this dataset, we propose See & Sniff, a self-supervised framework that learns joint visuo-olfactory representations via dense local alignment and naturally produces smell saliency maps for spatial grounding of odor sources. We further introduce pixel-level smell localization task and a benchmark for evaluation. Our method surpasses smell-only baselines by 7% in smell classification from smell alone and generalizes to cross-modal retrieval and smell localization, establishing visuo-olfactory learning as a new direction in multimodal perception.

Seeing Through Touch: Tactile-Driven Visual Localization of Material Regions

We address the problem of tactile localization, where the goal is to identify image regions that share the same material properties as a tactile input. Existing visuo-tactile methods rely on global alignment and thus fail to capture the fine-grained local correspondences required for this task. The challenge is amplified by existing datasets, which predominantly contain close-up, low-diversity images. We propose a model that learns local visuo-tactile alignment via dense cross-modal feature interactions, producing tactile saliency maps for touch-conditioned material segmentation. To overcome dataset constraints, we introduce: (i) in-the-wild multi-material scene images that expand visual diversity, and (ii) a material-diversity pairing strategy that aligns each tactile sample with visually varied yet tactilely consistent images, improving contextual localization and robustness to weak signals. We also construct two new tactile-grounded material segmentation datasets for quantitative evaluation. Experiments on both new and existing benchmarks show that our approach substantially outperforms prior visuo-tactile methods in tactile localization.

Seeing Speech and Sound: Distinguishing and Locating Audios in Visual Scenes

We present a unified model capable of simultaneously grounding both spoken language and non-speech sounds within a visual scene, addressing key limitations in current audio-visual grounding models. Existing approaches are typically limited to handling either speech or non-speech sounds independently, or at best, together but sequentially without mixing. This limitation prevents them from capturing the complexity of real-world audio sources that are often mixed. Our approach introduces a 'mix-and-separate' framework with audio-visual alignment objectives that jointly learn correspondence and disentanglement using mixed audio. Through these objectives, our model learns to produce distinct embeddings for each audio type, enabling effective disentanglement and grounding across mixed audio sources. Additionally, we created a new dataset to evaluate simultaneous grounding of mixed audio sources, demonstrating that our model outperforms prior methods. Our approach also achieves comparable or better performance in standard segmentation and cross-modal retrieval tasks, highlighting the benefits of our mix-and-separate approach.