In this paper, we introduce Claim-Level Rubric Rewards (CuRe), a structured reward framework designed to address the reward-design bottleneck in reinforcement learning for dense video captioning. Existing reward designs generally fall into two categories: holistic response-level judgment across heterogeneous criteria, or alignment-based evaluation against reference captions.
arXiv:2511. 16757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio-language pretraining (ALP) holds promise for learning general-purpose audio representation, yet remains underexplored.
By Wei-Cheng Tseng, Xuanru Zhou, Mingyue Huo, Yiwen Shao, Hao Zhang, Dong Yu
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.
By Zineb Lahrichi, Marc Ferras, Ga\"el Richard, Geoffroy Peeters
The paper introduces an evaluation framework for structured audio captions that separates acoustic and semantic aspects, such as timestamped sound event descriptions. It covers five axes—tag sets, descriptions, reasoning, numeric measurements, and spectral profiles—using large language model judges for semantics and deterministic metrics for temporal and acoustic features. Controlled perturbations validate that the metrics are robust to paraphrases but sensitive to real semantic and acoustic errors.
By Liang-Yuan Wu, Sripathi Sridhar, Mark Cartwright, Magdalena Fuentes
arXiv:2606. 07387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State-of-the-art text-to-music generation systems rely on massive proprietary datasets and industrial-scale compute, making it impossible to disentangle architectural contributions from resource advantages.
By Yun-Chen Cheng, Tzu-Hung Huang, Chih-Pin Tan
arXiv:2608. 18607v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using reinforcement learning to post-train joint video-audio generation models requires a reward signal.
By Yinming Huang, Shuyuan Tu, Xi Yan, Zihan Yang, Jianhua Han, Xu Hang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Zuxuan Wu
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:2607. 03248v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The alignment of large language models with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization.
By Jialiang Wang, Xianming Liu, Xiong Zhou, Hui Liu, Haoliang Li
arXiv:2603. 00610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind.
By Yinghao Ma, Haiwen Xia, Hewei Gao, Weixiong Chen, Yuxin Ye, Yuchen Yang, Sungkyun Chang, Mingshuo Ding, Yizhi Li, Ruibin Yuan, Simon Dixon, Emmanouil Benetos
arXiv:2607. 13408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent text-to-audio models generate high-quality audio, but often fail to follow instructions involving multiple sound events and temporal order.
By Chun-Yi Kuan, Siwon Kim, Byeonggeun Kim, Suyoun Kim, Bo-Ru Lu, Qinming Tang, Ankur Gandhe, Hung-yi Lee, Chieh-Chi Kao, Chao Wang
arXiv:2602. 17658v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward modeling is central to alignment pipelines such as RLHF, RLAIF, and PPO-based policy optimization, yet its reliability is constrained by limited and heterogeneous human preference data that are expensive to collect at scale.
By Payel Bhattacharjee, Osvaldo Simeone, Ravi Tandon
arXiv:2607. 27109v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the development of audio large language models (AudioLLMs), audio captioning needs to move from brief descriptions toward open-ended and fine-grained free-form descriptions.
By Weijie Wu, Junbo Li, Lin Li, Jun Fang, Qingyang Hong