The paper introduces BEANS-Next, a comprehensive benchmark covering acoustic perception, biological category recognition, scene understanding, and in-context learning in bioacoustics, and shows that current audio‑language models perform poorly outside the narrow label‑centric tasks traditionally evaluated. To address this gap, the authors present ROOTS, a large‑scale training dataset enriched with curated real‑world data, behavioral and acoustic metadata, and synthetic generation, which improves performance across all BEANS‑Next task groups. Both the benchmark and dataset are released as open‑source resources to accelerate research in bioacoustics and ethology.
Bioacoustics and ethology encompass a wide range of audio understanding tasks, many of which stand to benefit from recent advances in large audio-language models. However, progress in the field has so...
arXiv:2502. 16584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advancements in audio tokenization have significantly enhanced the integration of audio capabilities into large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2608.29121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-Vocabulary Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (OV-AVSS) aims to perform pixel-level segmentation of sound-emitting objects from an open set of cat...
arXiv:2609.15221v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic monitoring can measure biodiversity at larger scales, but time--frequency annotation of animal vocalizations is expensive, site-spec...
arXiv:2607. 14072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data.
Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data. Recent work has shown that supervision alone can produce SotA species detection models when trained on this large-scale data -- however, there remains unutilized potential in the form of recording metadata readily available within these community-driven data hubs.
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:2606. 14662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task.
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:2512.07571v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a simple method that allows to easily enhance textual pre-trained large language models with speech information, when fine-tune...
arXiv:2605. 13672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot classification (FSC) is widely used for learning from limited labeled data, yet most evaluations implicitly assume that target concepts are independent of contextual cues.
arXiv:2610.07338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio benchmarks are built around short, pre-segmented clips, limiting model design to brief inputs or fixed vocabularies. To close this gap, we intr...