arXiv AI

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.

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 AI
Jun 2

MOSS-Audio Technical Report

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 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
arXiv AI
5d ago

MusTBench: Benchmarking and Advancing Temporal Grounding in Music LLMs

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

OmniReasoner: Thinking with Long Audio-Video via Native Tool Use

Long audio-video reasoning is difficult for omnimodal LLMs because the decisive evidence is often sparse, cross-modal, and too expensive to preserve with uniformly high-fidelity inputs. We introduce OmniReasoner, a tool-use post-training framework for Thinking with Long Audio-Video: omni-modal LLMs learn, via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to decide whether and where to call a zoom-in tool before answering.

arXiv AI
5d ago

TimeSteer: Inference-Time Speech Scheduling in Joint Audio-Visual Diffusion Models

TimeSteer introduces inference‑time speech scheduling for joint audio‑visual diffusion models, enabling users to place speech and visual articulation within specified time intervals without fine‑tuning the backbone. The method leverages two properties of the denoising process: a timing‑sensitive text‑to‑audio cross‑attention head that reveals each utterance’s source span, and a predicted clean latent that already organizes coupled speech and visual content. TimeSteer localizes each utterance’s source span and remaps the associated audio‑visual latent to the target interval, and the authors present SpeechShift as the first benchmark for interval‑level speech scheduling.

By Chao Zhou, Yiling Chen, Qi Chu, Tao Gong, Nenghai Yu, Tianyi We
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Listen, Reason, and Segment: Aligning LALMs with Editorial Judgment for Media Chapterization

arXiv:2608. 16539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have made rapid progress on standardized benchmarks, yet their deployment in practical media workflows, curation, archival indexing, and content distribution remains largely unrealized.

By Tony Alex, Wish Suharitdamrong, Sara Atito, Armin Mustafa, Muhammad Awais, Philip J. B. Jackson, Jiankang Deng, Ismail Elezi