Paper
Crab$^{+}$: A Scalable and Unified Audio-Visual Scene Understanding Model with Explicit Cooperation
Authors
Dongnuan Cai, Henghui Du, Chang Zhou, Xi Chen, Dan Guo, Hongyuan Zhang, Xuelong Li, Di Hu
Abstract
Developing Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) for unified scene understanding is pivotal in multimodal intelligence. While instruction tuning enables pre-trained models with multi-task abilities, we observe that conventional multi-task unification methods often suffer from severe negative transfer, where nearly 55% of tasks degrade compared to single-task training. We attribute this phenomenon to audio-visual task heterogeneity, characterized by disparate task granularity and divergent capability demands, which lead to negative interference under joint training. To tackle this, we present Crab$^{+}$, a scalable and unified audio-visual scene understanding model that addresses task heterogeneity through explicit cooperation from both data and model perspectives. On the data side, we introduce AV-UIE v2, a comprehensive Audio-Visual Unified Instruction-tuning dataset with Explicit reasoning processes. It contains approximately 222K samples spanning 17 datasets and 7 tasks, enabling the model to capture cross-task relationships at different levels of granularity. On the model side, we design a unified interface to align heterogeneous task formulations, and propose Interaction-aware LoRA (I-LoRA), which explicitly models inter-task relationships via dynamic routing to coordinate distinct audio-visual interaction patterns, mitigating parameter interference. Extensive experiments show Crab$^{+}$ covers broader tasks than existing unified models while outperforming specialized models on various benchmarks. We successfully reverse the negative transfer trend, achieving positive transfer where multi-task learning surpasses single-task baselines in nearly 88% of tasks. These results hold across diverse AV-LLM paradigms and are validated through in-depth visualization, positioning Crab$^{+}$ as a robust step towards holistic audio-visual scene understanding.
Metadata
Related papers
Gen-Searcher: Reinforcing Agentic Search for Image Generation
Kaituo Feng, Manyuan Zhang, Shuang Chen, Yunlong Lin, Kaixuan Fan, Yilei Jian... • 2026-03-30
On-the-fly Repulsion in the Contextual Space for Rich Diversity in Diffusion Transformers
Omer Dahary, Benaya Koren, Daniel Garibi, Daniel Cohen-Or • 2026-03-30
Graphilosophy: Graph-Based Digital Humanities Computing with The Four Books
Minh-Thu Do, Quynh-Chau Le-Tran, Duc-Duy Nguyen-Mai, Thien-Trang Nguyen, Khan... • 2026-03-30
ParaSpeechCLAP: A Dual-Encoder Speech-Text Model for Rich Stylistic Language-Audio Pretraining
Anuj Diwan, Eunsol Choi, David Harwath • 2026-03-30
RAD-AI: Rethinking Architecture Documentation for AI-Augmented Ecosystems
Oliver Aleksander Larsen, Mahyar T. Moghaddam • 2026-03-30
Raw Data (Debug)
{
"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04128v1</id>\n <title>Crab$^{+}$: A Scalable and Unified Audio-Visual Scene Understanding Model with Explicit Cooperation</title>\n <updated>2026-03-04T14:43:57Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04128v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.04128v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>Developing Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) for unified scene understanding is pivotal in multimodal intelligence. While instruction tuning enables pre-trained models with multi-task abilities, we observe that conventional multi-task unification methods often suffer from severe negative transfer, where nearly 55% of tasks degrade compared to single-task training. We attribute this phenomenon to audio-visual task heterogeneity, characterized by disparate task granularity and divergent capability demands, which lead to negative interference under joint training. To tackle this, we present Crab$^{+}$, a scalable and unified audio-visual scene understanding model that addresses task heterogeneity through explicit cooperation from both data and model perspectives. On the data side, we introduce AV-UIE v2, a comprehensive Audio-Visual Unified Instruction-tuning dataset with Explicit reasoning processes. It contains approximately 222K samples spanning 17 datasets and 7 tasks, enabling the model to capture cross-task relationships at different levels of granularity. On the model side, we design a unified interface to align heterogeneous task formulations, and propose Interaction-aware LoRA (I-LoRA), which explicitly models inter-task relationships via dynamic routing to coordinate distinct audio-visual interaction patterns, mitigating parameter interference. Extensive experiments show Crab$^{+}$ covers broader tasks than existing unified models while outperforming specialized models on various benchmarks. We successfully reverse the negative transfer trend, achieving positive transfer where multi-task learning surpasses single-task baselines in nearly 88% of tasks. These results hold across diverse AV-LLM paradigms and are validated through in-depth visualization, positioning Crab$^{+}$ as a robust step towards holistic audio-visual scene understanding.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.CV'/>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.AI'/>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.MM'/>\n <published>2026-03-04T14:43:57Z</published>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.CV'/>\n <author>\n <name>Dongnuan Cai</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Henghui Du</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Chang Zhou</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Xi Chen</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Dan Guo</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Hongyuan Zhang</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Xuelong Li</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Di Hu</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}