A streaming audio-visual speaker extractor cut parameters by 91.9 percent and inference latency 11.1 times against the causal baseline, and shipped the benchmark that showed why
AspireAI community · arXiv (Sang, Li, Li, Huang & Hu)
Falcon addresses two gaps at once in streaming audio-visual target speaker extraction, the task of isolating one speaker from a live camera and microphone feed. The authors argue standard benchmarks fix the speaker count at two and ignore near-field interference, reverberation and sudden noise, so they release RealSSA, with a controllable simulated set carrying 1 to 5 dynamic near-field interfering speakers and 10 to 15 far-field ones where relevant, plus a held-out real-recorded set captured with a single iPhone 17 Pro across eight environments. On the model side, Falcon's separator does multi-scale time-frequency separation in one encoder-decoder pass rather than repeatedly invoking a small separator, and an encoder-space speaker contrastive loss suppresses near-field leakage at zero inference cost and transfers across backbones. The paper reports state-of-the-art extraction quality on RealSSA-Sim and on LRS2-2Mix, LRS3-2Mix and VoxCeleb2-2Mix, and against the causal AV-TFGridNet baseline it cuts parameters by 91.9 percent, computation by 20.2 times and GPU inference latency by 11.1 times. Code and a demo are available, and the numbers are relative to that one named baseline.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.