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:2512. 09066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable assessment of the abilities of large audio language models (LALMs) is essential to advancing the state of the art.
By \v{S}imon Sedl\'a\v{c}ek, Sara Barahona, Bolaji Yusuf, Laura Herrera-Alarc\'on, Santosh Kesiraju, Cecilia Bola\~nos, Alicia Lozano-Diez, Sathvik Udupa, Fernando L\'opez, Allison Ferner, Ramani Duraiswami, Jan \v{C}ernock\'y
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.
By Hui Geng, Yi Su, Han Yin, Tianjiao Wan, Qisheng Xu, Jiaxin Chen, Zijian Gao, Hengzhu Liu, Xie Chen, Kele Xu
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.
By Jiawen Wang, Xiaoxue Gao, Zi Haur Pang, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv:2606. 00125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Music recommendation systems typically treat songs as opaque tokens, relying on collaborative interaction histories which overlooks semantic or acoustic content.
By Srikar Prabhas Kandagatla, Sreehitha R. Narayana, Chandana Magapu, Swetha Mohan, Shamanth Kuthpadi, Hongjie Chen, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Nesreen Ahmed
MUUNRiver-Bench is a diagnostic benchmark for music retrieval that uses natural‑language instructions to define relevance for reference‑audio queries. It contains 3,440 tracks across 13 genres and 116 sub‑genres and covers seven tasks such as similar‑music, style‑preserving lyric‑rewriting, cover, and segment retrieval. Experiments with six models in eight configurations show that acoustic encoders favor local identity while text‑aligned encoders favor semantic relations, and that instruction‑aware and audio‑text fusion systems do not consistently outperform their backbones.
By Zhancheng Guo, Congren Dai, Shangda Wu, Jianhuai Hu, Danni Zhao, Xiaobing Li, Maosong Sun