Complex activities in real-world audio unfold over extended durations and exhibit hierarchical structure, yet most prior work focuses on short clips and isolated events. To bridge this gap, we introduce MultiAct, a new dataset and benchmark for multi-level structured understanding of human activities from long-form audio. MultiAct comprises long-duration kitchen recordings annotated at three semantic levels (activities, sub-activities and events) and paired with fine-grained captions and high-level summaries. We further propose a unified hierarchical model that jointly performs classification, detection, sequence prediction and multi-resolution captioning. Experiments on MultiAct establish strong baselines and reveal key challenges in modelling hierarchical and compositional structure of long-form audio. A promising direction for future work is the exploration of methods better suited to capturing the complex, long-range relationships in long-form audio.
@article{arxiv.2602.06765,
title = {Hierarchical Activity Recognition and Captioning from Long-Form Audio},
author = {Peng Zhang and Qingyu Luo and Philip J. B. Jackson and Wenwu Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.06765},
year = {2026}
}