Implicit Counterfactual Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation
This addresses modality gaps and biases in audio-visual segmentation for video analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with novel components.
The paper tackles the problem of modality representation discrepancies and imbalances in audio-visual segmentation by proposing an implicit counterfactual framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets.
Audio-visual segmentation (AVS) aims to segment objects in videos based on audio cues. Existing AVS methods are primarily designed to enhance interaction efficiency but pay limited attention to modality representation discrepancies and imbalances. To overcome this, we propose the implicit counterfactual framework (ICF) to achieve unbiased cross-modal understanding. Due to the lack of semantics, heterogeneous representations may lead to erroneous matches, especially in complex scenes with ambiguous visual content or interference from multiple audio sources. We introduce the multi-granularity implicit text (MIT) involving video-, segment- and frame-level as the bridge to establish the modality-shared space, reducing modality gaps and providing prior guidance. Visual content carries more information and typically dominates, thereby marginalizing audio features in the decision-making. To mitigate knowledge preference, we propose the semantic counterfactual (SC) to learn orthogonal representations in the latent space, generating diverse counterfactual samples, thus avoiding biases introduced by complex functional designs and explicit modifications of text structures or attributes. We further formulate the collaborative distribution-aware contrastive learning (CDCL), incorporating factual-counterfactual and inter-modality contrasts to align representations, promoting cohesion and decoupling. Extensive experiments on three public datasets validate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.