When does distribution alignment help a frozen foundation-model embedding generalize across acoustic domains? For cross-domain mosquito-species classification we report a strength-monotonic law: the s...
arXiv:2608. 14824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a parameter-free episodic evaluation of nearest-centroid classification for elephant vocalisations on fixed pretrained acoustic embeddings, across the Elephant Voices (EV) and Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) datasets.
arXiv:2512. 10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose audio representations aim to map acoustically variable instances of the same event to nearby points, resolving content identity in a zero-shot setting.
The paper introduces modality‑gated deep adapters, a parameter‑efficient method for adding new modalities to a frozen multimodal embedding language model without altering its existing outputs. These adapters are bottleneck modules attached to each decoder layer, grouped into modality‑specific packs that activate only during encoding of their own modality, ensuring exact preservation of the base model’s computation graph. Experiments on a 2B base model show significant gains in audio‑to‑text and thermal‑to‑text retrieval metrics, and the authors release the audio and thermal packs along with training and evaluation code.
arXiv:2607. 03304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable analysis of bird vocalisations in passive acoustic monitoring requires models handling multiple, imbalanced annotation targets.
arXiv:2609.17981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs), typically built from a pre-trained speech encoder, a modality projector, and an LLM fine-tuned with Low-R...
Swiss-Knife is a framework that extends decode‑time alignment for frozen language models by treating the alignment specification as a runtime object. It introduces hot‑swappable scoring blades, a batch normaliser, a pairwise aggregation operator, and a selection rule, and characterises admissible aggregation operators with a representation theorem. In experiments, Swiss‑Knife paired with DPO‑LoRA blades and an uncertainty‑aware pairwise tournament outperforms six existing decode‑time methods, achieving a higher harmonic F1 score, lower refusal rate, and faster objective reconfiguration.
arXiv:2607. 04526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: First-shot anomalous sound detection in DCASE Challenge Task 2 must flag anomalies of unseen machine types with a single threshold, without knowing whether a test clip comes from the data-rich source domain (990 normal training clips) or the data-scarce target domain (10).
The paper introduces CUES, a lightweight heuristic for selecting encoder combinations in large audio‑language models by estimating complementarity through Pearson correlations of single‑encoder performance profiles. Using a frozen SmolLM2‑135M backbone, CUES consistently identifies optimal encoder sets for each track on the XARES‑LLM benchmark without requiring fusion training or test data. On broad audio tasks, CUES selects a diverse trio of encoders, improving performance by 4.3% over Whisper‑medium, while on text generation it opts for a focused speech‑only pair, outperforming mHuBERT‑147 by 6.3%. The results illustrate how correlation signals guide a diversity–interference trade‑off across different task families.
The paper introduces Murmur2Vec, a lightweight, alignment‑free embedding that uses k‑mer counts hashed with MurmurHash to create a compact representation for biological sequences. It provides a full theoretical analysis, including bias/variance formulas, a Johnson–Lindenstrauss‑style concentration bound, and an excess‑risk bound that clarifies the trade‑off between hash‑table size and classifier performance. Empirically, Murmur2Vec matches or surpasses a fine‑tuned 650M‑parameter ESM‑2 protein language model across several classification tasks, including SARS‑CoV‑2 spike lineage and HIV‑1 Env subtype identification.
arXiv:2607. 11007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Few-shot multimodal classification commonly attaches a lightweight head, such as $k$-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, or a linear SVM, to a frozen pretrained encoder.
Multi-encoder fusion extends Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) beyond speech-centric recognition, but selecting encoders via intuition or exhaustive search often introduces redundant representations...