SIMPLE: Semantic Structure-Aligned Prompt Learning for Open-Vocabulary Audio-Visual Event Localization

Abstract

Open-vocabulary audio-visual event localization aims to infer explicit segment-level categories for both seen and unseen audio-visual events. Existing solutions rely heavily on hand-crafted prompt templates, whose predictions are highly sensitive to subtle wording variations. Learnable prompts remove this manual tuning burden, but when trained solely on seen events, they tend to overfit to seen categories and distort the inter-event semantic topology required for generalization to unseen categories, a failure we term semantic topology drift. In this paper, we propose SIMPLE, a semantic structure-aligned prompt learning framework that aligns cross-category semantic topology between learnable and hand-crafted prompts across asynchronous audio and visual streams. Specifically, our SIMPLE combines Learnable Continuous Prompt Tuning (LCPT) with Semantic Topology Consistency Regularization (STCR). The LCPT automates prompt engineering through data-driven optimization, while the STCR module aligns the category-wise similarity distributions of learnable and hand-crafted prompts under random category subset sampling to alleviate semantic topology drift. Comprehensive experiments and analyses on the OV-AVEBench demonstrate that our SIMPLE framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the seen and unseen splits, while using roughly half the trainable parameters and roughly one-third the training time.