arXiv AI September 2, 2026 By Daeyong Kwon, Qiyu Wu, Shinobu Kuriya, Junghyun Koo, Shuyang Cui, Zhi Zhong, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji

MusTBench: Benchmarking and Advancing Temporal Grounding in Music LLMs

Read the original on arXiv AI →

MusTBench is a music‑expert‑validated benchmark that evaluates temporal grounding in Large Audio‑Language Models (LALMs) through five temporally grounded question‑answering tasks. The paper also introduces MusT, a four‑stage optimization recipe—music encoder adaptation, LLM adaptation, supervised fine‑tuning, and RL‑based optimization—to improve temporal grounding. Experiments show that current LALMs struggle with precise temporal grounding, while MusT yields significant improvements, highlighting temporal grounding as a key missing capability in these models.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI

6d ago

TEMPO: Temporally-grounded Multi-task Post-training for Large Audio-Language Models

TEMPO is a unified model that adds temporally‑grounded capabilities to large audio‑language models, enabling timestamping of events, speakers, and sounds in audio, speech, and music. It introduces a supervised fine‑tuning stage featuring atomic timestamp tokens, a time‑aware projector with sinusoidal encodings, and a distance‑aware Gaussian loss, trained via a synthetic‑to‑real curriculum. Additionally, TEMPO employs reinforcement learning (GRPO) as a refinement step, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on a benchmark of 10K samples across five timestamping tasks, surpassing Audio Flamingo Next and Qwen3‑Omni.

By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Utathya Aich, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha

llms rag reinforcement-learning fine-tuning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 7

Auto-AEG: Scalable Data Construction for Open-Vocabulary Audio Event Grounding

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

llms reinforcement-learning fine-tuning benchmarks

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

llms agents nlp fine-tuning multimodal

arXiv AI

Jul 1

Beyond Binary Instrument QA: Probing Instrument Grounding in Music Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 31338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent music audio-language models achieve high accuracy on instrument question-answering benchmarks, but it remains unclear whether this reflects robust audio grounding or benchmark-specific shortcuts.

By Yujun Lee, Joonhyeok Shin, Hyoeun Kim, Kyuhong Shim

llms benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 24

Event-Grounded Question Answering over Long Audio via Structured Retrieval

arXiv:2602. 14612v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Answering natural-language questions over multi-hour audio requires both event recognition and temporal grounding.

By Kartik Hegde, Arvind Krishna Sridhar, Naveen Vakada, Yinyi Guo, Erik Visser

llms rag nlp benchmarks data-engineering

arXiv Machine Learning

Aug 11

Assessing Factual Music Comprehension in Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2511. 05550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) leverage multimodal representations to generate open-ended answers to natural language queries about audio.

By Daniel Chenyu Lin, Michael Freeman, John Thickstun

llms multimodal benchmarks

One email a morning, machine-written

Related stories

TEMPO: Temporally-grounded Multi-task Post-training for Large Audio-Language Models

Auto-AEG: Scalable Data Construction for Open-Vocabulary Audio Event Grounding

MOSS-Audio Technical Report

Beyond Binary Instrument QA: Probing Instrument Grounding in Music Audio-Language Models

Event-Grounded Question Answering over Long Audio via Structured Retrieval

Assessing Factual Music Comprehension in Large Audio Language Models