arXiv subjects

Peiwen Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Peiwen Sun.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Stepping Stones: A Progressive Training Strategy for Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to achieve pixel-level localization of sound sources in videos, while Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (AVSS), as an extension of AVS, further pursues semantic understanding of audio-visual scenes. However, since the AVSS task requires the establishment of audio-visual correspondence and semantic understanding simultaneously, we observe that previous methods have struggled to handle this mashup of objectives in end-to-end training, resulting in insufficient learning and sub-optimization. Therefore, we propose a two-stage training strategy called \textit{Stepping Stones}, which decomposes the AVSS task into two simple subtasks from localization to semantic understanding, which are fully optimized in each stage to achieve step-by-step global optimization. This training strategy has also proved its generalization and effectiveness on existing methods. To further improve the performance of AVS tasks, we propose a novel framework Adaptive Audio Visual Segmentation, in which we incorporate an adaptive audio query generator and integrate masked attention into the transformer decoder, facilitating the adaptive fusion of visual and audio features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art results on all three AVS benchmarks. The project homepage can be accessed at https://gewu-lab.github.io/stepping_stones/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Unveiling and Mitigating Bias in Audio Visual Segmentation

Community researchers have developed a range of advanced audio-visual segmentation models aimed at improving the quality of sounding objects' masks. While masks created by these models may initially appear plausible, they occasionally exhibit anomalies with incorrect grounding logic. We attribute this to real-world inherent preferences and distributions as a simpler signal for learning than the complex audio-visual grounding, which leads to the disregard of important modality information. Generally, the anomalous phenomena are often complex and cannot be directly observed systematically. In this study, we made a pioneering effort with the proper synthetic data to categorize and analyze phenomena as two types "audio priming bias" and "visual prior" according to the source of anomalies. For audio priming bias, to enhance audio sensitivity to different intensities and semantics, a perception module specifically for audio perceives the latent semantic information and incorporates information into a limited set of queries, namely active queries. Moreover, the interaction mechanism related to such active queries in the transformer decoder is customized to adapt to the need for interaction regulating among audio semantics. For visual prior, multiple contrastive training strategies are explored to optimize the model by incorporating a biased branch, without even changing the structure of the model. During experiments, observation demonstrates the presence and the impact that has been produced by the biases of the existing model. Finally, through experimental evaluation of AVS benchmarks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in handling both types of biases, achieving competitive performance across all three subsets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Can Textual Semantics Mitigate Sounding Object Segmentation Preference?

The Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) task aims to segment sounding objects in the visual space using audio cues. However, in this work, it is recognized that previous AVS methods show a heavy reliance on detrimental segmentation preferences related to audible objects, rather than precise audio guidance. We argue that the primary reason is that audio lacks robust semantics compared to vision, especially in multi-source sounding scenes, resulting in weak audio guidance over the visual space. Motivated by the the fact that text modality is well explored and contains rich abstract semantics, we propose leveraging text cues from the visual scene to enhance audio guidance with the semantics inherent in text. Our approach begins by obtaining scene descriptions through an off-the-shelf image captioner and prompting a frozen large language model to deduce potential sounding objects as text cues. Subsequently, we introduce a novel semantics-driven audio modeling module with a dynamic mask to integrate audio features with text cues, leading to representative sounding object features. These features not only encompass audio cues but also possess vivid semantics, providing clearer guidance in the visual space. Experimental results on AVS benchmarks validate that our method exhibits enhanced sensitivity to audio when aided by text cues, achieving highly competitive performance on all three subsets. Project page: \href{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Sounding-Object-Segmentation-Preference}{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Sounding-Object-Segmentation-Preference}

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Ref-AVS: Refer and Segment Objects in Audio-Visual Scenes

Traditional reference segmentation tasks have predominantly focused on silent visual scenes, neglecting the integral role of multimodal perception and interaction in human experiences. In this work, we introduce a novel task called Reference Audio-Visual Segmentation (Ref-AVS), which seeks to segment objects within the visual domain based on expressions containing multimodal cues. Such expressions are articulated in natural language forms but are enriched with multimodal cues, including audio and visual descriptions. To facilitate this research, we construct the first Ref-AVS benchmark, which provides pixel-level annotations for objects described in corresponding multimodal-cue expressions. To tackle the Ref-AVS task, we propose a new method that adequately utilizes multimodal cues to offer precise segmentation guidance. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three test subsets to compare our approach with existing methods from related tasks. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to precisely segment objects using multimodal-cue expressions. Dataset is available at \href{https://gewu-lab.github.io/Ref-AVS}{https://gewu-lab.github.io/Ref-AVS}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

FusionINN: Decomposable Image Fusion for Brain Tumor Monitoring

Image fusion typically employs non-invertible neural networks to merge multiple source images into a single fused image. However, for clinical experts, solely relying on fused images may be insufficient for making diagnostic decisions, as the fusion mechanism blends features from source images, thereby making it difficult to interpret the underlying tumor pathology. We introduce FusionINN, a novel decomposable image fusion framework, capable of efficiently generating fused images and also decomposing them back to the source images. FusionINN is designed to be bijective by including a latent image alongside the fused image, while ensuring minimal transfer of information from the source images to the latent representation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the decomposability of fused images, which is particularly crucial for life-sensitive applications such as medical image fusion compared to other tasks like multi-focus or multi-exposure image fusion. Our extensive experimentation validates FusionINN over existing discriminative and generative fusion methods, both subjectively and objectively. Moreover, compared to a recent denoising diffusion-based fusion model, our approach offers faster and qualitatively better fusion results.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2023

More than Vanilla Fusion: a Simple, Decoupling-free, Attention Module for Multimodal Fusion Based on Signal Theory

The vanilla fusion methods still dominate a large percentage of mainstream audio-visual tasks. However, the effectiveness of vanilla fusion from a theoretical perspective is still worth discussing. Thus, this paper reconsiders the signal fused in the multimodal case from a bionics perspective and proposes a simple, plug-and-play, attention module for vanilla fusion based on fundamental signal theory and uncertainty theory. In addition, previous work on multimodal dynamic gradient modulation still relies on decoupling the modalities. So, a decoupling-free gradient modulation scheme has been designed in conjunction with the aforementioned attention module, which has various advantages over the decoupled one. Experiment results show that just a few lines of code can achieve up to 2.0% performance improvements to several multimodal classification methods. Finally, quantitative evaluation of other fusion tasks reveals the potential for additional application scenarios.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2022

Learning Audio-Visual embedding for Person Verification in the Wild

It has already been observed that audio-visual embedding is more robust than uni-modality embedding for person verification. Here, we proposed a novel audio-visual strategy that considers aggregators from a fusion perspective. First, we introduced weight-enhanced attentive statistics pooling for the first time in face verification. We find that a strong correlation exists between modalities during pooling, so joint attentive pooling is proposed which contains cycle consistency to learn the implicit inter-frame weight. Finally, each modality is fused with a gated attention mechanism to gain robust audio-visual embedding. All the proposed models are trained on the VoxCeleb2 dev dataset and the best system obtains 0.18%, 0.27%, and 0.49% EER on three official trial lists of VoxCeleb1 respectively, which is to our knowledge the best-published results for person verification.

cs.CV↗