arXiv:2607. 04383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) reason fluently about sound yet struggle to localize precisely when events occur, while classical Sound Event Detection attains frame-level precision only over a closed label set.
arXiv:2602. 10230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Audio language models process input audio into rich frame-level representations, but the standard approach to temporal localization generates timestamps as sequences of text tokens, which discards the frame-level representations in favor of autoregressive decoding.
arXiv:2602. 14612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Answering natural-language questions over multi-hour audio requires both event recognition and temporal grounding.
arXiv:2606. 01802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: MOSS-Audio is a unified audio-language model for speech, environmental sound, and music understanding, supporting audio captioning, time-aware question answering, timestamped transcription, and audio-grounded reasoning.
Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have achieved remarkable progress in audio perceptual tasks across individual acoustic layers, including speech, sound, and music. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate these layers in isolation, overlooking the complex contextual relationships that arise when multiple acoustic sources co-occur in real-world auditory scenes.
arXiv:2606. 14141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sound events are entities with semantic identities, locations, and trajectories, but current audio-language models usually reason about clips as global event content.
The paper introduces STAG, a post‑hoc framework that provides token‑level spectro‑temporal grounding for captions produced by audio‑based multimodal large language models (MLLMs). STAG estimates temporal support for each token via vocabulary projections of encoded audio, measures frequency‑band relevance through controlled spectral occlusion, and fuses these signals into a spectro‑temporal relevance map. Evaluations across ten explanation methods and four grounding benchmarks show that STAG achieves superior event‑localization performance on every dataset, and counterfactual deletion experiments confirm that removing the identified evidence selectively reduces model confidence and often eliminates the corresponding event from regenerated captions.
TEMPO is a unified model that adds temporally‑grounded capabilities to large audio‑language models, enabling timestamping of events, speakers, and sounds in audio, speech, and music. It introduces a supervised fine‑tuning stage featuring atomic timestamp tokens, a time‑aware projector with sinusoidal encodings, and a distance‑aware Gaussian loss, trained via a synthetic‑to‑real curriculum. Additionally, TEMPO employs reinforcement learning (GRPO) as a refinement step, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on a benchmark of 10K samples across five timestamping tasks, surpassing Audio Flamingo Next and Qwen3‑Omni.
Video-HolmesV2 is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models on their ability to reason with spatio‑temporal audio‑visual evidence in long videos. It requires models to justify answers with precise evidence, uses a multi‑model cross‑verification pipeline and a spatio‑temporal evidence‑aware metric, and introduces an audio‑text guided token compression framework to reduce long‑context noise. In evaluations, even strong proprietary models score below 60% while the proposed approach outperforms comparable open‑source omni‑models.
MusTBench is a music‑expert‑validated benchmark that evaluates temporal grounding in Large Audio‑Language Models (LALMs) through five temporally grounded question‑answering tasks. The paper also introduces MusT, a four‑stage optimization recipe—music encoder adaptation, LLM adaptation, supervised fine‑tuning, and RL‑based optimization—to improve temporal grounding. Experiments show that current LALMs struggle with precise temporal grounding, while MusT yields significant improvements, highlighting temporal grounding as a key missing capability in these models.
arXiv:2607. 13408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent text-to-audio models generate high-quality audio, but often fail to follow instructions involving multiple sound events and temporal order.
Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive video understanding, yet their ability to reason over long-form narratives is often masked by visual-centric evaluations and inefficient c...