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.

Cinematic Audio Source Separation Using Visual Cues

Cinematic Audio Source Separation (CASS) aims to decompose mixed film audio into speech, music, and sound effects, enabling applications like dubbing and remastering. Existing CASS approaches are audio-only, overlooking the inherent audio-visual nature of films, where sounds often align with visual cues. We present the first framework for audio-visual CASS (AV-CASS), leveraging visual context to enhance separation quality. Our method formulates CASS as a conditional generative modeling problem using conditional flow matching, enabling multimodal audio source separation. To address the lack of cinematic datasets with isolated sound tracks, we introduce a training data synthesis pipeline that pairs in-the-wild audio and video streams (e.g., facial videos for speech, scene videos for effects) and design a dedicated visual encoder for this dual-stream setup. Trained entirely on synthetic data, our model generalizes effectively to real-world cinematic content and achieves strong performance on synthetic, real-world, and audio-only CASS benchmarks. Code and demo are available at \url{https://cass-flowmatching.github.io}.

Plug-and-Steer: Decoupling Separation and Selection in Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction

The goal of this paper is to provide a new perspective on audio-visual target speaker extraction (AV-TSE) by decoupling the separation and target selection. Conventional AV-TSE systems typically integrate audio and visual features deeply to re-learn the entire separation process, which can act as a fidelity ceiling due to the noisy nature of in-the-wild audio-visual datasets. To address this, we propose Plug-and-Steer, which assigns high-fidelity separation to a frozen audio-only backbone and limits the role of visual modality strictly to target selection. We introduce the Latent Steering Matrix (LSM), a minimalist linear transformation that re-routes latent features within the backbone to anchor the target speaker to a designated channel. Experiments across four representative architectures show that our method effectively preserves the acoustic priors of diverse backbones, achieving perceptual quality comparable to the original backbones. Audio samples are available at: https://plugandsteer.github.io

On the Nature of Attention Sink that Shapes Decoding Strategy in MLLMs

Large language models and their multimodal extensions have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks, yet the internal mechanisms that govern their reasoning behaviour remain partially understood. In particular, the attention sink, a token that attracts disproportionate attention mass, has been observed in transformer architectures, but its role is still unclear. Our goal is to understand what attention sinks represent and how they shape model behaviour during inference, rather than considering them as incidental artifacts. Through our analysis, we find that attention sink representations encode structured global information that influences the decoding process. Building on our findings, we introduce OutRo, a lightweight inference-time strategy that leverages the sink token to enhance contextual representations: (i) non-sink token representations are aligned with the sink representation in the feature space; and (ii) the sink token is allowed to attend beyond the causal constraint, facilitating information exchange with non-sink tokens. This design enhances the reasoning process without requiring additional forward passes or access to attention maps. Based on extensive experiments, OutRo consistently improves performance across representative MLLMs on seven video QA benchmarks and demonstrates strong generalisation, while incurring only a 1.1x decoding overhead.

MamTra: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Backbone for Speech Synthesis

Despite the remarkable quality of LLM-based text-to-speech systems, their reliance on autoregressive Transformers leads to quadratic computational complexity, which severely limits practical applications. Linear-time alternatives, notably Mamba, offer a potential remedy; however, they often sacrifice the global context essential for expressive synthesis. In this paper, we propose MamTra, an interleaved Mamba-Transformer framework designed to leverage the advantages of Mamba's efficiency and Transformers' modeling capability. We also introduce novel knowledge transfer strategies to distill insights from a pretrained Transformer into our hybrid architecture, thereby bypassing the prohibitive costs of training from scratch. Systematic experiments identify the optimal hybrid configuration, and demonstrate that MamTra reduces inference VRAM usage by up to 34% without compromising speech fidelity - even trained on only 2% of the original training dataset. Audio samples are available at https://mamtratts.github.io.

UNMIXX: Untangling Highly Correlated Singing Voices Mixtures

We introduce UNMIXX, a novel framework for multiple singing voices separation (MSVS). While related to speech separation, MSVS faces unique challenges: data scarcity and the highly correlated nature of singing voices mixture. To address these issues, we propose UNMIXX with three key components: (1) musically informed mixing strategy to construct highly correlated, music-like mixtures, (2) cross-source attention that drives representations of two singers apart via reverse attention, and (3) magnitude penalty loss penalizing erroneously assigned interfering energy. UNMIXX not only addresses data scarcity by simulating realistic training data, but also excels at separating highly correlated mixtures through cross-source interactions at both the architectural and loss levels. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that UNMIXX greatly enhances performance, with SDRi gains exceeding 2.2 dB over prior work.

FastAV: Efficient Token Pruning for Audio-Visual Large Language Model Inference

In this work, we present FastAV, the first token pruning framework tailored for audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs). While token pruning has been actively explored in standard large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (LVLMs), its application to AV-LLMs has received little attention, even though multimodal integration substantially increases their token demands. To address this gap, we introduce a pruning strategy that utilizes attention weights to identify tokens emphasized at different stages and estimates their importance. Building on this analysis, FastAV applies a two-stage pruning strategy: (1) global pruning in intermediate layers to remove broadly less influential tokens, and (2) fine pruning in later layers considering the impact on next token generation. Notably, our method does not rely on full attention maps, which makes it fully compatible with efficient attention mechanisms such as FlashAttention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FastAV reduces FLOPs by more than 40% on two representative AV-LLMs, while preserving or even improving model performance.

LAMB: LLM-based Audio Captioning with Modality Gap Bridging via Cauchy-Schwarz Divergence

Automated Audio Captioning aims to describe the semantic content of input audio. Recent works have employed large language models (LLMs) as a text decoder to leverage their reasoning capabilities. However, prior approaches that project audio features into the LLM embedding space without considering cross-modal alignment fail to fully utilize these capabilities. To address this, we propose LAMB, an LLM-based audio captioning framework that bridges the modality gap between audio embeddings and the LLM text embedding space. LAMB incorporates a Cross-Modal Aligner that minimizes Cauchy-Schwarz divergence while maximizing mutual information, yielding tighter alignment between audio and text at both global and token levels. We further design a Two-Stream Adapter that extracts semantically enriched audio embeddings, thereby delivering richer information to the Cross-Modal Aligner. Finally, leveraging the aligned audio embeddings, a proposed Token Guide directly computes scores within the LLM text embedding space to steer the output logits of generated captions. Experimental results confirm that our framework strengthens the reasoning capabilities of the LLM decoder, achieving state-of-the-art performance on AudioCaps.

TAVID: Text-Driven Audio-Visual Interactive Dialogue Generation

The objective of this paper is to jointly synthesize interactive videos and conversational speech from text and reference images. With the ultimate goal of building human-like conversational systems, recent studies have explored talking or listening head generation as well as conversational speech generation. However, these works are typically studied in isolation, overlooking the multimodal nature of human conversation, which involves tightly coupled audio-visual interactions. In this paper, we introduce TAVID, a unified framework that generates both interactive faces and conversational speech in a synchronized manner. TAVID integrates face and speech generation pipelines through two cross-modal mappers (i.e., a motion mapper and a speaker mapper), which enable bidirectional exchange of complementary information between the audio and visual modalities. We evaluate our system across four dimensions: talking face realism, listening head responsiveness, dyadic interaction fluency, and speech quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across all these aspects.

LP-CFM: Perceptual Invariance-Aware Conditional Flow Matching for Speech Modeling

The goal of this paper is to provide a new perspective on speech modeling by incorporating perceptual invariances such as amplitude scaling and temporal shifts. Conventional generative formulations often treat each dataset sample as a fixed representative of the target distribution. From a generative standpoint, however, such samples are only one among many perceptually equivalent variants within the true speech distribution. To address this, we propose Linear Projection Conditional Flow Matching (LP-CFM), which models targets as projection-aligned elongated Gaussians along perceptually equivalent variants. We further introduce Vector Calibrated Sampling (VCS) to keep the sampling process aligned with the line-projection path. In neural vocoding experiments across model sizes, data scales, and sampling steps, the proposed approach consistently improves over the conventional optimal transport CFM, with particularly strong gains in low-resource and few-step scenarios. These results highlight the potential of LP-CFM and VCS to provide more robust and perceptually grounded generative modeling of speech.