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.
By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Utathya Aich, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2609.15215v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have substantially advanced general audio understanding, yet they remain limited in fine-grained temporal percept...
By Yanfeng Shi, Yan Song, Junhui Li, Tinggan Huang, Wu Guo, Haoyu Song, Ian McLoughlin
arXiv:2602. 14612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Answering natural-language questions over multi-hour audio requires both event recognition and temporal grounding.
By Kartik Hegde, Arvind Krishna Sridhar, Naveen Vakada, Yinyi Guo, Erik Visser
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.
By Chun-Yi Kuan, Siwon Kim, Byeonggeun Kim, Suyoun Kim, Bo-Ru Lu, Qinming Tang, Ankur Gandhe, Hung-yi Lee, Chieh-Chi Kao, Chao Wang
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.
By Chen Yang, Chufan Yu, Hanfu Chen, Jie Zhu, Jingqi Chen, Ke Chen, Wenxuan Wang, Yang Wang, Yaozhou Jiang, Yi Jiang, Zhengyuan Lin, Ziqi Chen, Zhaoye Fei, Chenghao Liu, Jun Zhan, Kang Yu, Kexin Huang, Mingshu Chen, Qinyuan Cheng, Ruixiao Li, Shimin Li, Songlin Wang, Yang Gao, Yiyang Zhang, Xipeng Qiu
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.
By Joseph An, Phillip Keung, Jiaqi Wang, Orevaoghene Ahia, Noah A. Smith
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.
By Daeyong Kwon, Qiyu Wu, Shinobu Kuriya, Junghyun Koo, Shuyang Cui, Zhi Zhong, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji
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: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).
By Liumeng Xue, Ziya Zhou, Jiahao Pan, Zixuan Li, Shuai Fan, Yinghao Ma, Sitong Cheng, Dongchao Yang, Haohan Guo, Yujia Xiao, Xinsheng Wang, Zixuan Shen, Chuanbo Zhu, Xinshen Zhang, Tianchi Liu, Ruibin Yuan, Zeyue Tian, Haohe Liu, Xingjian Du, Emmanouil Benetos, Ge Zhang, Yike Guo, Wei Xue
arXiv:2607. 16736v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents RealDESED, a real-world domestic sound event detection (SED) benchmark comprising 5,710 audio recordings collected by 652 participants in their homes.
By Florian Schmid, Paul Primus, Alexander Fichtinger, Tara Jadidi, Tobias Morocutti, Gerhard Widmer
arXiv:2606. 07387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State-of-the-art text-to-music generation systems rely on massive proprietary datasets and industrial-scale compute, making it impossible to disentangle architectural contributions from resource advantages.
By Yun-Chen Cheng, Tzu-Hung Huang, Chih-Pin Tan
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.
By Oh Hyun-Bin, Kazuki Shimada, Yuhta Takida, Kim Sung-Bin, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Takashi Shibuya, Kyeongyoon Lee, Tae-Hyun Oh, Yuki Mitsufuji