Audio Description (AD) provides spoken narration of visual events during dialogue gaps, making movies accessible to visually impaired audiences. The problem requires determining both what (which visua...
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.
By Zihan Zhang, Xize Cheng, Wenhao Yan, Tong Zhang, Dongjie Fu, Boyun Zhang, Yongbo He, Tao Jin
The paper introduces Cue2Narrate, a two‑stage pipeline that jointly predicts what visual events to narrate and when to insert the narration in long, untrimmed movie clips. It uses a dual‑head audio‑visual localizer to identify visual cue and narration windows, followed by a LoRA‑adapted vision‑language model that generates concise audio descriptions, trained with a Description Ranking Loss. The authors also present the LongLSMDC benchmark, comprising up to 8‑minute clips, and show that Cue2Narrate outperforms video‑only and audio‑only baselines by 5–12 points in average mAP and improves AD generation over fine‑tuned base VLMs.
By Akshita Gupta, Aditya Arora, Federico Tombari, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach
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
The paper introduces an audio-first triage method for budgeted vision‑language captioning of untrimmed egocentric video. By selecting windows for a vision‑language model based on lightweight audio features before any video decoding, the approach reduces costly model calls. It achieves 4.0–10.8 percentage point improvements in action coverage across call rates, cuts 9–20% of VLM calls at matched coverage on EPIC‑KITCHENS‑100, and outperforms uniform sampling and recent visual keyframe selectors on Ego4D.
By Masoud Jalayer, Changyi Li, Yu Xiao
arXiv:2610.08192v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Audio-visual models improve egocentric action recognition by exploiting complementary cues, yet typically assume that both streams remain available at...
By Souptik Sen, Zahra Ahmadi
arXiv:2606. 06294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporal Grounding (TG) aims to localize video segments corresponding to a textual query.
By Qi Xu, Yue Tan, Shihao Chen, Jiahao Meng, Anna Wang, Shunping Ji, Hao Fei, Jason Li
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.
By Zhaoyang Wei, Zipeng Wang, Yushe Cao, Chenhui Qiang, Shuaibing Cheng, Xuesong Yang, Sen Nie, Bowen Jiang, Wenchao Ding, Yanchao Hao, Zheng Wei, Xuehui Yu, Zhenjun Han
SONIC‑O1 is a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models on audio‑video understanding. It contains 60 hours of 231 clips across 13 real‑world conversational domains, with 4,958 human‑verified annotations and demographic metadata. The benchmark tests open‑ended summarization, multiple‑choice question answering, and temporally grounded reasoning, revealing performance gaps between model families and across demographic groups.
By Ahmed Y. Radwan, Christos Emmanouilidis, Hina Tabassum, Deval Pandya, Shaina Raza
arXiv:2608. 09435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding dynamic sound sources requires jointly determining what produces a sound, where the source is located, and how it moves over time.
By Zhi Zeng, Cheng Zhang, Zesheng Yang, Rendong Pi, Jiaying Wu, Di Zhang, Zihan Ma, Guodong Li, Zhou Yang, Yu Xiang, Yifei Zheng, Minnan Luo
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