arXiv:2606. 30682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in language--audio retrieval have been largely driven by contrastive dual-encoder architectures that align audio and text in a shared embedding space.
arXiv:2511. 16757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio-language pretraining (ALP) holds promise for learning general-purpose audio representation, yet remains underexplored.
arXiv:2606. 14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of audio understanding tasks, yet they still struggle with complex audio reasoning.
VoiceTrace introduces a new benchmark, VoiceTrace-Bench, for hybrid speech retrieval that combines a textual query specifying "what" to retrieve with a reference speech specifying "who" to retrieve. The authors propose a two‑stage framework: VoiceTrace‑Emb, which learns unified audio‑text embeddings for efficient large‑scale retrieval, and VoiceTrace‑Reranker, which fine‑grains relevance by jointly examining query‑candidate pairs. Experiments show VoiceTrace outperforms existing methods on both traditional semantic speech retrieval benchmarks and the new hybrid setting.
SonicCaps is a large-scale audio captioning dataset featuring approximately 15 million captions paired with 700,000 audio clips, created using the Qwen3-Omni multimodal language model. The dataset emphasizes diversity by generating around 24 captions per clip through structured prompt engineering and few-shot generation, covering main descriptions, rephrased variants, and semantic tags. Human evaluations rate SonicCaps higher than existing datasets, and training CLAP models on it improves audio retrieval and zero-shot classification across public and commercial benchmarks.
The paper introduces Omni-Interactive Universal Embedder (OmniUE), a unified embedding framework that learns a single representation space for text, video, and audio using learnable tokens and intermediate-layer representations. OmniUE supports omni-interactive querying, allowing users to input text, visual regions, or audio spans, which are processed by segmenters and an omni-LLM to generate user-conditioned embeddings. The authors evaluate OmniUE on the new OmniCHOIR benchmark and other multimodal tasks, reporting significant performance gains over state‑of‑the‑art baselines across textual, audio, and visual interactive settings.
EXAM$^2$ is a new benchmark for audio understanding that covers six languages and multiple modalities—speech, sound, music, mixed-audio, and visual images—providing 5,667 multiple-choice questions, 22,614 image instances, and 135,684 multilingual translations. It evaluates large audio language models (LALMs) and multimodal large language models (LLMs), revealing significant gaps in multilingual and cross‑modal performance. The authors also introduce Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion model that improves multilingual results by up to 12.4% and multimodal results by 21.7% over a strong baseline.
The Eloquence team presents three methods for the Interspeech 2026 MLC‑SLM Task 2, a multilingual MCQA challenge covering 21 languages. They fine‑tune Voxtral‑Mini‑3B with LoRA and data augmentation, achieving 0.72 macro‑accuracy; they use multimodal in‑context learning on Voxtral‑24B to correct label bias, reaching 0.81; and they deploy a training‑free retrieval system with a voice‑anchored memory, scoring 0.68. All approaches surpass the official baseline.
The Eloquence team presents three strategies for the Interspeech 2026 MLC‑SLM Task 2, a multilingual MCQA challenge across 21 languages. They fine‑tune Voxtral‑Mini‑3B with LoRA and cross‑lingual augmentations, achieving 0.72 macro‑accuracy; they use multimodal in‑context learning on the frozen Voxtral‑24B to correct label bias, reaching 0.81; and they deploy a training‑free retrieval system with a voice‑anchored memory, scoring 0.68. All approaches surpass the official baseline.
UniAE-MoE is a unified audio encoder that uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to model cross‑domain audio representations. It integrates encoder components from Qwen2‑Audio and Audio‑Flamingo 3, enhances them with SwiGLU and shared experts, and applies a two‑stage instruction‑tuning strategy along with task‑specific data scaling. The model achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on the XARES‑LLM benchmark (0.802) and tops the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, demonstrating strong generalization across speech, music, and general audio tasks.
arXiv:2511. 05550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) leverage multimodal representations to generate open-ended answers to natural language queries about audio.
arXiv:2607. 12290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-language embedding models such as CLAP are widely evaluated on matching present sound events, but rarely on negation.
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.