Multimodal Confidence Modeling in Audio-Visual Quality Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mithila, Mayesha Maliha R., Farias, Mylene C. Q.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Mithila, Mayesha Maliha R.
Farias, Mylene C. Q.
author_facet Mithila, Mayesha Maliha R.
Farias, Mylene C. Q.
contents Audio-visual quality assessment (AVQA) is essential for streaming, teleconferencing, and immersive media. In realistic streaming scenarios, distortions are often asymmetric, where one modality may be severely degraded while the other remains clean. Still, most contemporary AVQA metrics treat audio and video as equally reliable, causing confidence-unaware fusion to emphasize unreliable signals. This paper proposes MCM-AVQA, a multimodal confidence-aware AVQA framework that explicitly estimates modality-specific confidence and injects it into a dedicated audio-visual mixer for cross-modal attention. The Audio-Visual Mixer utilizes frame-level, confidence-guided channel attention to gate fusion, modulating feature interaction between modalities so that high-confidence streams dominate while unreliable inputs are suppressed, preserving temporal degradation patterns. A multi-head visual confidence estimator turns frame-level artifact probabilities into temporally smoothed, clip-level visual confidence scores, while an audio confidence module derives confidence from speech-quality cues without requiring a clean reference. Experiments on multiple AVQA benchmarks show that MCM-AVQA, and specifically its confidence-guided Audio-Visual Mixer, improve correlation with human mean opinion scores and yield more interpretable behavior under real-world asymmetric audio-visual distortions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01219
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Confidence Modeling in Audio-Visual Quality Assessment
Mithila, Mayesha Maliha R.
Farias, Mylene C. Q.
Multimedia
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Sound
Image and Video Processing
cs.CV, eess.IV
Audio-visual quality assessment (AVQA) is essential for streaming, teleconferencing, and immersive media. In realistic streaming scenarios, distortions are often asymmetric, where one modality may be severely degraded while the other remains clean. Still, most contemporary AVQA metrics treat audio and video as equally reliable, causing confidence-unaware fusion to emphasize unreliable signals. This paper proposes MCM-AVQA, a multimodal confidence-aware AVQA framework that explicitly estimates modality-specific confidence and injects it into a dedicated audio-visual mixer for cross-modal attention. The Audio-Visual Mixer utilizes frame-level, confidence-guided channel attention to gate fusion, modulating feature interaction between modalities so that high-confidence streams dominate while unreliable inputs are suppressed, preserving temporal degradation patterns. A multi-head visual confidence estimator turns frame-level artifact probabilities into temporally smoothed, clip-level visual confidence scores, while an audio confidence module derives confidence from speech-quality cues without requiring a clean reference. Experiments on multiple AVQA benchmarks show that MCM-AVQA, and specifically its confidence-guided Audio-Visual Mixer, improve correlation with human mean opinion scores and yield more interpretable behavior under real-world asymmetric audio-visual distortions.
title Multimodal Confidence Modeling in Audio-Visual Quality Assessment
topic Multimedia
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Sound
Image and Video Processing
cs.CV, eess.IV
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01219