Taming Modality Entanglement in Continual Audio-Visual Segmentation
Authors: name: Yuyang Hong; name: Qi Yang; name: Tao Zhang; name: Zili Wang; name: Zhaojin Fu; name: Kun Ding; name: Bin Fan; name: Shiming Xiang
Published: 2025-10-20 07:23:36

Abstract: Recently, significant progress has been made in multi-modal continual
learning, aiming to learn new tasks sequentially in multi-modal settings while
preserving performance on previously learned ones. However, existing methods
mainly focus on coarse-grained tasks, with limitations in addressing modality
entanglement in fine-grained continual learning settings. To bridge this gap,
we introduce a novel Continual Audio-Visual Segmentation (CAVS) task, aiming to
continuously segment new classes guided by audio. Through comprehensive
analysis, two critical challenges are identified: 1) multi-modal semantic
drift, where a sounding objects is labeled as background in sequential tasks;
2) co-occurrence confusion, where frequent co-occurring classes tend to be
confused. In this work, a Collision-based Multi-modal Rehearsal (CMR) framework
is designed to address these challenges. Specifically, for multi-modal semantic
drift, a Multi-modal Sample Selection (MSS) strategy is proposed to select
samples with high modal consistency for rehearsal. Meanwhile, for co-occurence
confusion, a Collision-based Sample Rehearsal (CSR) mechanism is designed,
allowing for the increase of rehearsal sample frequency of those confusable
classes during training process. Moreover, we construct three audio-visual
incremental scenarios to verify effectiveness of our method. Comprehensive
experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms single-modal
continual learning methods.