arXiv Computer Vision

TiTok: Audio-Visual LLM for Multi-Segment Temporal Grounding

TiTok is an audio‑visual large language model designed for multi‑segment temporal grounding in untrimmed videos. It introduces Time Token Interleaving (TTI) to align temporal perception with prediction, and uses decoupled reinforcement‑learning rewards (global, local, count, precision, format) optimized via GDPO. Evaluated on a new UnAV‑100 protocol with the CountF1 metric, TiTok achieves state‑of‑the‑art results (65.7 mIoU, 0.58 CountF1).

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Auto-AEG: Scalable Data Construction for Open-Vocabulary Audio Event Grounding

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

From Visual Cues to Spoken Narration: Rethinking Audio Description

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
arXiv AI
Sep 1

TEMPO: Temporally-grounded Multi-task Post-training for Large Audio-Language Models

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 AI
Aug 25

Pre-Decoding Acoustic Triage for Budgeted Vision-Language Captioning of Untrimmed Egocentric Video

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 Computer Vision
Sep 16

Video-HolmesV2: Can MLLMs Reason with Spatio-Temporal Audio-Visual Evidence in Long Videos?

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
arXiv AI
Oct 2

SONIC-O1: A Real-World Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Audio-Video Understanding

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 AI
Aug 11

Listen, See and Track: Spatio-Temporal Audio-Visual Sound Event Reasoning for Omni-Modal Language Models

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 Machine Learning
Jul 24

Encode Once, Decode Never: Reusing Audio LM Internals for Efficient Temporal Localization

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