arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

BEANS-Next and ROOTS: Broadening Audio-Language Capabilities for Bioacoustics

The paper introduces BEANS-Next, a comprehensive benchmark covering acoustic perception, biological category recognition, scene understanding, and in-context learning in bioacoustics, and shows that current audio‑language models perform poorly outside the narrow label‑centric tasks traditionally evaluated. To address this gap, the authors present ROOTS, a large‑scale training dataset enriched with curated real‑world data, behavioral and acoustic metadata, and synthetic generation, which improves performance across all BEANS‑Next task groups. Both the benchmark and dataset are released as open‑source resources to accelerate research in bioacoustics and ethology.

By Christos Plachouras, David Robinson, Marius Miron, Gagan Narula, Paul Laisn\'e, Anthony L. T. Fine, Benno Weck, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Diane Kim, Laura Hay Mack, Maddie Cusimano, Sara Keen, Lukas Rauch, Benjamin Hoffman, Emmanuel Chemla, Emmanouil Benetos, Johan Pauwels, Milad Alizadeh, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15

MetaPerch: Learning from metadata for bioacoustics foundation models

Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data. Recent work has shown that supervision alone can produce SotA species detection models when trained on this large-scale data -- however, there remains unutilized potential in the form of recording metadata readily available within these community-driven data hubs.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Beyond task performance: Decoding bioacoustic embeddings with speech features

arXiv:2606. 14662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task.

By Ines Nolasco, Jules Cauzinille, Marius Miron, Gagan Narula, Milad Alizadeh, Emmanuel Fernandez, Matthieu Geist, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Olivier Pietquin, Emmanuel Chemla, Sara Keen