Same Image, Different Meanings: Toward Retrieval of Context-Dependent Meanings

A scene of two people in the rain can convey hope and warmth in a reunion story or sorrow and finality in a farewell story. We investigate this context-dependent nature of image meaning and its implications for retrieval. Our key observation is that context dependency correlates with semantic abstraction: concrete elements (objects, actions) remain stable across contexts, while abstract elements (atmosphere, intent) shift with context. We operationalize this as the L1--L4 framework, organizing image semantics from context-independent (L1) to maximally context-dependent (L4). Using synthetic story contexts and queries for controlled evaluation, we examine how injecting narrative context into embeddings affects retrieval across abstraction levels. Concrete queries are retrievable without context, while abstract levels increasingly depend on narrative grounding. Where context is injected also matters, with image-side enrichment proving particularly effective. The most abstract level, however, remains challenging even with full context, highlighting context-dependent image retrieval as an important open problem. Our framework and findings lay groundwork toward retrieval systems that handle the context-dependent meanings images acquire in narrative settings.

The TMU System for the XACLE Challenge: Training Large Audio Language Models with CLAP Pseudo-Labels

In this paper, we propose a submission to the x-to-audio alignment (XACLE) challenge. The goal is to predict semantic alignment of a given general audio and text pair. The proposed system is based on a large audio language model (LALM) architecture. We employ a three-stage training pipeline: automated audio captioning pretraining, pretraining with CLAP pseudo-labels, and fine-tuning on the XACLE dataset. Our experiments show that pretraining with CLAP pseudo-labels is the primary performance driver. On the XACLE test set, our system reaches an SRCC of 0.632, significantly outperforming the baseline system (0.334) and securing third place in the challenge team ranking. Code and models can be found at https://github.com/shiotalab-tmu/tmu-xacle2026