Papers › Separating the "Chirp" from the "Chat": Self-supervised Visual Grounding of Sound and Language
Separating the "Chirp" from the "Chat": Self-supervised Visual Grounding of Sound and Language
Mark Hamilton, Andrew Zisserman, John R. Hershey, William T. Freeman
We present DenseAV, a novel dual encoder grounding architecture that learns high-resolution, semantically meaningful, and audio-visually aligned features solely through watching videos. We show that DenseAV can discover the ``meaning'' of words and the ``location'' of sounds without explicit localization supervision. Furthermore, it automatically discovers and distinguishes between these two types of associations without supervision. We show that DenseAV's localization abilities arise from a new multi-head feature aggregation operator that directly compares dense image and audio representations for contrastive learning. In contrast, many other systems that learn ``global'' audio and video representations cannot localize words and sound. Finally, we contribute two new datasets to improve the evaluation of AV representations through speech and sound prompted semantic segmentation. On these and other datasets we show DenseAV dramatically outperforms the prior art on speech and sound prompted semantic segmentation. DenseAV outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, ImageBind, on cross-modal retrieval using fewer than half of the parameters. Project Page: \href{https://aka.ms/denseav}{https://aka.ms/denseav}
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Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sound Prompted Semantic Segmentation | ADE20K | DenseAV | mAP | 32.7 | #1 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sound Prompted Semantic Segmentation | ADE20K | DenseAV | mIoU | 24.7 | #1 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Speech Prompted Semantic Segmentation | ADE20K | DenseAV | mAP | 48.7 | #1 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Speech Prompted Semantic Segmentation | ADE20K | DenseAV | mIoU | 36.8 | #1 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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