Query-Guided Spatial–Temporal–Frequency Interaction for Music Audio–Visual Question Answering

Audio–Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a challenging multimodal task that requires jointly reasoning over audio, visual, and textual information in a given video to answer natural language questions. Inspired by recent advances in Video QA, many existing AVQA approaches primarily focus on visual information processing, leveraging pre-trained models to extract object-level and motion-level representations. However, in those methods, the audio input is primarily treated as complementary to video analysis, and the textual question information contributes minimally to audio–visual understanding, as it is typically integrated only in the final stages of reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Query-guided Spatial–Temporal–Frequency (QSTar) interaction method, which effectively incorporates question-guided clues and exploits the distinctive frequency-domain characteristics of audio signals, alongside spatial and temporal perception, to enhance audio–visual understanding. Furthermore, we introduce a Query Context Reasoning (QCR) block inspired by prompting, which guides the model to focus more precisely on semantically relevant audio and visual features. Extensive experiments conducted on two AVQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving significant performance improvements over existing Audio QA, Visual QA, Video QA, and AVQA approaches. The code is released under https://github.com/lik1996/QSTar.