arXiv Computation and Language

SonicCaps: Large-Scale Diverse and Fine-Grained Captioning for Improved Audio-Retrieval

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 8

FIGMA: Towards FIne-Grained Music retrievAl

arXiv:2606. 06615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving music using natural language descriptions has improved with contrastive audio-text models such as CLAP, but current systems remain limited to coarse semantic queries.

By Nishit Anand, Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, Dinesh Manocha, Ramani Duraiswami
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Empowering Long-form Omni-modal Understanding with Robust Audio Perception

arXiv:2607. 10299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale multimodal models have drivenremarkable progress in vision-language tasks; however, comprehensiveomni-modal understanding remains under-explored, largely due to thescarcity of datasets with rich, explicitly aligned auditory cues.

By Kaiying Yan, Luoyi Sun, Xiao Zhou, Weidi Xie
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Audio-FLAN: An Instruction-Following Dataset for Unified Audio Understanding and Generation of Speech, Music, and Sound

arXiv:2502. 16584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advancements in audio tokenization have significantly enhanced the integration of audio capabilities into large language models (LLMs).

By Liumeng Xue, Ziya Zhou, Jiahao Pan, Zixuan Li, Shuai Fan, Yinghao Ma, Sitong Cheng, Dongchao Yang, Haohan Guo, Yujia Xiao, Xinsheng Wang, Zixuan Shen, Chuanbo Zhu, Xinshen Zhang, Tianchi Liu, Ruibin Yuan, Zeyue Tian, Haohe Liu, Xingjian Du, Emmanouil Benetos, Ge Zhang, Yike Guo, Wei Xue
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

What Did the MLLM Hear? Token-Level Spectro-Temporal Grounding for Audio MLLM Explainability

The paper introduces STAG, a post‑hoc framework that provides token‑level spectro‑temporal grounding for captions produced by audio‑based multimodal large language models (MLLMs). STAG estimates temporal support for each token via vocabulary projections of encoded audio, measures frequency‑band relevance through controlled spectral occlusion, and fuses these signals into a spectro‑temporal relevance map. Evaluations across ten explanation methods and four grounding benchmarks show that STAG achieves superior event‑localization performance on every dataset, and counterfactual deletion experiments confirm that removing the identified evidence selectively reduces model confidence and often eliminates the corresponding event from regenerated captions.

By Lucia Cascone, Valeria Fraenza, Michele Nappi, Fabio Narducci, Benedetto Simone
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 AI
Aug 26

Do Joint Language-Audio Embeddings Encode Perceptual Timbre Semantics?

The paper investigates whether joint language‑audio embedding models encode human perceptual timbre semantics. It evaluates several state‑of‑the‑art models, finding that LAION‑CLAP aligns best with human‑perceived timbre across instrumental sounds and descriptor‑conditioned audio effects, yet the overall alignment remains limited. The study also notes that reverb‑induced timbre semantics are more consistently captured than equalization‑induced ones.

By Qixin Deng, Bryan Pardo, Thrasyvoulos N Pappas