10 accepted papers
We present Task 5 of the DCASE 2025 Challenge: an Audio Question Answering (AQA) benchmark spanning multiple domains of sound understanding. This task defines three QA subsets (Bioacoustics, Temporal Soundscapes, and Complex QA) to test audio-language models on interactive question-answering over di…
Understanding and reasoning over non-speech sounds and music are crucial for both humans and AI agents to interact effectively with their environments. In this paper, we introduce Audio Flamingo 2 (AF2), an Audio-Language Model (ALM) with advanced audio understanding and reasoning capabilities. AF2…
The ability to comprehend audio—which includes speech, non-speech sounds, and music—is crucial for AI agents to interact effectively with the world. We present MMAU, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal audio understanding models on tasks requiring expert-level knowledge and complex rea…
We present ABEX, a novel and effective generative data augmentation methodology for low-resource Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. ABEX is based on ABstract-and-EXpand, a novel paradigm for generating diverse forms of an input document – we first convert a document into its concise, abstra…
Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world atypical scenarios where such features are absent. This paper presents ASP…
A fundamental characteristic of audio is its compositional nature. Audio-language models (ALMs) trained using a contrastive approach (e.g., CLAP) that learns a shared representation between audio and language modalities have improved performance in many downstream applications, including zero-shot a…
Open-vocabulary vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, trained using contrastive loss, have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text-to-image retrieval. However, do VLMs understand compound nouns (CNs) (e.g., *lab coat*) as well as they understand nouns (e.g., *lab*)? We curate Compun, a novel…
In this paper, we present EH-MAM (Easy-to-Hard adaptive Masked Acoustic Modeling), a novel self-supervised learning approach for speech representation learning. In contrast to the prior methods that use random masking schemes for Masked Acoustic Modeling (MAM), we introduce a novel selective and ada…
Perceiving and understanding non-speech sounds and non-verbal speech is essential to making decisions that help us interact with our surroundings. In this paper, we propose GAMA, a novel General-purpose Large Audio-Language Model (LALM) with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abiliti…
We present DALE, a novel and effective generative Data Augmentation framework for low-resource LEgal NLP. DALE addresses the challenges existing frameworks pose in generating effective data augmentations of legal documents - legal language, with its specialized vocabulary and complex semantics, morp…