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: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
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
Audio Description (AD) provides spoken narration of visual events during dialogue gaps, making movies accessible to visually impaired audiences. The problem requires determining both what (which visua...
The paper introduces Cue2Narrate, a two‑stage pipeline that jointly predicts what visual events to narrate and when to insert the narration in long, untrimmed movie clips. It uses a dual‑head audio‑visual localizer to identify visual cue and narration windows, followed by a LoRA‑adapted vision‑language model that generates concise audio descriptions, trained with a Description Ranking Loss. The authors also present the LongLSMDC benchmark, comprising up to 8‑minute clips, and show that Cue2Narrate outperforms video‑only and audio‑only baselines by 5–12 points in average mAP and improves AD generation over fine‑tuned base VLMs.
By Akshita Gupta, Aditya Arora, Federico Tombari, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach