MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark

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 reasoning. MMAU comprises 10k carefully curated audio clips paired with human-annotated natural language questions and answers spanning speech, environmental sounds, and music. It includes information extraction and reasoning questions, requiring models to demonstrate 27 distinct skills across unique and challenging tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU emphasizes advanced perception and reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, challenging models to tackle tasks akin to those faced by experts. We assess 18 open-source and proprietary (Large) Audio-Language Models, demonstrating the significant challenges posed by MMAU. Notably, even the most advanced Gemini Pro v1.5 achieves only 52.97% accuracy, and the state-of-the-art open-source Qwen2-Audio achieves only 52.50%, highlighting considerable room for improvement. We believe MMAU will drive the audio and multimodal research community to develop more advanced audio understanding models capable of solving complex audio tasks.

Biomimetic Frontend for Differentiable Audio Processing

While models in audio and speech processing are becoming deeper and more end-to-end, they as a consequence need expensive training on large data, and are often brittle. We build on a classical model of human hearing and make it differentiable, so that we can combine traditional explainable biomimetic signal processing approaches with deep-learning frameworks. This allows us to arrive at an expressive and explainable model that is easily trained on modest amounts of data. We apply this model to audio processing tasks, including classification and enhancement. Results show that our differentiable model surpasses black-box approaches in terms of computational efficiency and robustness, even with little training data. We also discuss other potential applications.

ReCLAP: Improving Zero Shot Audio Classification by Describing Sounds

Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.

GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities

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 Abilities. We build GAMA by integrating an LLM with multiple types of audio representations, including features from a custom Audio Q-Former, a multi-layer aggregator that aggregates features from multiple layers of an audio encoder. We fine-tune GAMA on a large-scale audio-language dataset, which augments it with audio understanding capabilities. Next, we propose CompA-R (Instruction-Tuning for Complex Audio Reasoning), a synthetically generated instruction-tuning (IT) dataset with instructions that require the model to perform complex reasoning on the input audio. We instruction-tune GAMA with CompA-R to endow it with complex reasoning abilities, where we further add a soft prompt as input with high-level semantic evidence by leveraging event tags of the input audio. Finally, we also propose CompA-R-test, a human-labeled evaluation dataset for evaluating the capabilities of LALMs on open-ended audio question-answering that requires complex reasoning. Through automated and expert human evaluations, we show that GAMA outperforms all other LALMs in literature on diverse audio understanding tasks by margins of 1%-84%. Further, GAMA IT-ed on CompA-R proves to be superior in its complex reasoning and instruction following capabilities.

LipGER: Visually-Conditioned Generative Error Correction for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition

Visual cues, like lip motion, have been shown to improve the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in noisy environments. We propose LipGER (Lip Motion aided Generative Error Correction), a novel framework for leveraging visual cues for noise-robust ASR. Instead of learning the cross-modal correlation between the audio and visual modalities, we make an LLM learn the task of visually-conditioned (generative) ASR error correction. Specifically, we instruct an LLM to predict the transcription from the N-best hypotheses generated using ASR beam-search. This is further conditioned on lip motions. This approach addresses key challenges in traditional AVSR learning, such as the lack of large-scale paired datasets and difficulties in adapting to new domains. We experiment on 4 datasets in various settings and show that LipGER improves the Word Error Rate in the range of 1.1%-49.2%. We also release LipHyp, a large-scale dataset with hypothesis-transcription pairs that is additionally equipped with lip motion cues to promote further research in this space

FAST: Factorizable Attention for Speeding up Transformers

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the computational and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in transformers from $O(N^2)$ to $O(N)$. In comparison to previous attempts, our work presents a linearly scaled attention mechanism that maintains the full representation of the attention matrix without compromising on sparsification and incorporates the all-to-all relationship between tokens. We explore the properties of our new attention metric and conduct tests in various standard settings. Results indicate that our attention mechanism has a robust performance and holds significant promise for diverse applications where self-attention is used.

A Closer Look at the Limitations of Instruction Tuning

Instruction Tuning (IT), the process of training large language models (LLMs) using instruction-response pairs, has emerged as the predominant method for transforming base pre-trained LLMs into open-domain conversational agents. While IT has achieved notable success and widespread adoption, its limitations and shortcomings remain underexplored. In this paper, through rigorous experiments and an in-depth analysis of the changes LLMs undergo through IT, we reveal various limitations of IT. In particular, we show that (1) IT fails to enhance knowledge or skills in LLMs. LoRA fine-tuning is limited to learning response initiation and style tokens, and full-parameter fine-tuning leads to knowledge degradation. (2) Copying response patterns from IT datasets derived from knowledgeable sources leads to a decline in response quality. (3) Full-parameter fine-tuning increases hallucination by inaccurately borrowing tokens from conceptually similar instances in the IT dataset for generating responses. (4) Popular methods to improve IT do not lead to performance improvements over a simple LoRA fine-tuned model. Our findings reveal that responses generated solely from pre-trained knowledge consistently outperform responses by models that learn any form of new knowledge from IT on open-source datasets. We hope the insights and challenges revealed inspire future work.

CompA: Addressing the Gap in Compositional Reasoning in Audio-Language Models

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 audio classification, audio retrieval, etc. However, the ability of these models to effectively perform compositional reasoning remains largely unexplored and necessitates additional research. In this paper, we propose CompA, a collection of two expert-annotated benchmarks with a majority of real-world audio samples, to evaluate compositional reasoning in ALMs. Our proposed CompA-order evaluates how well an ALM understands the order or occurrence of acoustic events in audio, and CompA-attribute evaluates attribute binding of acoustic events. An instance from either benchmark consists of two audio-caption pairs, where both audios have the same acoustic events but with different compositions. An ALM is evaluated on how well it matches the right audio to the right caption. Using this benchmark, we first show that current ALMs perform only marginally better than random chance, thereby struggling with compositional reasoning. Next, we propose CompA-CLAP, where we fine-tune CLAP using a novel learning method to improve its compositional reasoning abilities. To train CompA-CLAP, we first propose improvements to contrastive training with composition-aware hard negatives, allowing for more focused training. Next, we propose a novel modular contrastive loss that helps the model learn fine-grained compositional understanding and overcomes the acute scarcity of openly available compositional audios. CompA-CLAP significantly improves over all our baseline models on the CompA benchmark, indicating its superior compositional reasoning capabilities.

RECAP: Retrieval-Augmented Audio Captioning

We present RECAP (REtrieval-Augmented Audio CAPtioning), a novel and effective audio captioning system that generates captions conditioned on an input audio and other captions similar to the audio retrieved from a datastore. Additionally, our proposed method can transfer to any domain without the need for any additional fine-tuning. To generate a caption for an audio sample, we leverage an audio-text model CLAP to retrieve captions similar to it from a replaceable datastore, which are then used to construct a prompt. Next, we feed this prompt to a GPT-2 decoder and introduce cross-attention layers between the CLAP encoder and GPT-2 to condition the audio for caption generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Clotho and AudioCaps, show that RECAP achieves competitive performance in in-domain settings and significant improvements in out-of-domain settings. Additionally, due to its capability to exploit a large text-captions-only datastore in a \textit{training-free} fashion, RECAP shows unique capabilities of captioning novel audio events never seen during training and compositional audios with multiple events. To promote research in this space, we also release 150,000+ new weakly labeled captions for AudioSet, AudioCaps, and Clotho.

Multiple scattering ambisonics: three-dimensional sound foeld estimation using interacting spheres

Rigid spherical microphone arrays (RSMAs) have been widely used in ambisonics sound field recording. While it is desired to combine the information captured by a grid of densely arranged RSMAs for expanding the area of accurate reconstruction, or sweet-spots, this is not trivial due to inter-array interference. Here we propose multiple scattering ambisonics, a method for three-dimensional ambisonics sound field recording using multiple acoustically interacting RSMAs. Numerical experiments demonstrate the sweet-spot expansion realized by the proposed method. The proposed method can be used with existing RSMAs as building blocks and opens possibilities including higher degrees-of-freedom spatial audio.