How Far Can We Go With Synthetic Data for Audio-Visual Sound Source Localization?

We present the first scalable framework for training sound source localization (SSL) models using synthetic data from text-to-X models. Although SSL has made notable progress, existing models remain constrained by limited-scale, uncurated real-world datasets that often suffer from semantic misalignment. Furthermore, the introduction of new SSL tasks and benchmarks has increased the need for more generalizable models. To address these challenges, we leverage synthetic data to create synthetic clones of the VGGSound dataset, enabling both fully synthetic and hybrid real–synthetic training. We demonstrate that synthetic data can effectively replace, refine, and scale real training datasets. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that synthetic data not only matches real data in performance but also enables significant improvements when combined with real samples. Our findings provide the first systematic evidence that synthetic data can serve as a scalable and effective approach for advancing SSL models.