Related papers: Auden-Voice: General-Purpose Voice Encoder for Spe…
Contrastive language-audio pre-training (CLAP), which learns audio-language representations by aligning audio and text in a common feature space, has become popular for solving audio tasks. However, CLAP's audio features lack…
Audio-text retrieval is crucial for bridging acoustic signals and natural language. While contrastive dual-encoder architectures like CLAP have shown promise, they are fundamentally limited by the capacity of small-scale encoders.…
Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for audio interaction with humans. However, the absence of pre-trained audio models capable of handling diverse audio types and tasks has hindered progress…
Contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) has recently emerged as a method for making audio analysis more generalisable. Specifically, CLAP-style models are able to `answer' a diverse set of language queries, extending the capabilities…
Understanding and modeling the relationship between language and sound is critical for applications such as music information retrieval,text-guided music generation, and audio captioning. Central to these tasks is the use of joint…
Neural audio codecs are widely used as tokenizers for spoken language models, but they are optimized for waveform reconstruction rather than autoregressive prediction. This mismatch injects acoustically driven uncertainty into the discrete…
The text generation paradigm for audio tasks has opened new possibilities for unified audio understanding. However, existing models face significant challenges in achieving a comprehensive understanding across diverse audio types, such as…
This paper presents the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate and advance the performance of pre-trained audio encoders as front-end modules for Large Audio Language Models…
We present Unicoder, a universal language encoder that is insensitive to different languages. Given an arbitrary NLP task, a model can be trained with Unicoder using training data in one language and directly applied to inputs of the same…
Audio-Language models jointly learn multimodal text and audio representations that enable Zero-Shot inference. Models rely on the encoders to create powerful representations of the input and generalize to multiple tasks ranging from sounds,…
Connecting audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) allows the LLM to perform various audio understanding tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio captioning (AC). Most research focuses on training an adapter…
Full-duplex speech interaction, as the most natural and intuitive mode of human communication, is driving artificial intelligence toward more human-like conversational systems. Traditional cascaded speech processing pipelines suffer from…
We propose Unicoder-VL, a universal encoder that aims to learn joint representations of vision and language in a pre-training manner. Borrow ideas from cross-lingual pre-trained models, such as XLM and Unicoder, both visual and linguistic…
Contrastive language-audio pre-training (CLAP) enables zero-shot (ZS) inference of audio and exhibits promising performance in several classification tasks. However, conventional audio representations are still crucial for many tasks where…
Contrastive cross-modal models such as CLIP and CLAP aid various vision-language (VL) and audio-language (AL) tasks. However, there has been limited investigation of and improvement in their language encoder, which is the central component…
In audio-visual navigation (AVN), an intelligent agent needs to navigate to a constantly sound-making object in complex 3D environments based on its audio and visual perceptions. While existing methods attempt to improve the navigation…
Audio-language pretraining holds promise for general-purpose audio understanding, yet remains underexplored compared to its vision counterpart. While vision-language models like CLIP serve as widely adopted foundations, existing…
The goal of universal audio representation learning is to obtain foundational models that can be used for a variety of downstream tasks involving speech, music and environmental sounds. To approach this problem, methods inspired by works on…
Despite the well-developed cut-edge representation learning for language, most language representation models usually focus on specific levels of linguistic units. This work introduces universal language representation learning, i.e.,…
Open-vocabulary audio language models (ALMs), like Contrastive Language Audio Pretraining (CLAP), represent a promising new paradigm for audio-text retrieval using natural language queries. In this paper, for the first time, we perform…