SLIT: Boosting Audio-Text Pre-Training via Multi-Stage Learning and Instruction Tuning

Audio-text pre-training (ATP) has witnessed remarkable strides across a variety of downstream tasks. Yet, most existing pretrained audio models only specialize in either discriminative tasks or generative tasks. In this study, we develop SLIT, a novel ATP framework which transfers flexibly to both audio-text understanding and generation tasks, bootstrapping audio-text pre-training from frozen pretrained audio encoders and large language models. To bridge the modality gap during pre-training, we leverage Q-Former, which undergoes a multi-stage pre-training process. The first stage enhances audio-text representation learning from a frozen audio encoder, while the second stage boosts audio-to-text generative learning with a frozen language model. Furthermore, we introduce an ATP instruction tuning strategy, which enables flexible and informative feature extraction tailered to the given instructions for different tasks. Experiments show that SLIT achieves superior performances on a variety of audio-text understanding and generation tasks, and even demonstrates strong generalization capabilities when directly applied to zero-shot scenarios.

Masked Audio Modeling with CLAP and Multi-Objective Learning

Most existing masked audio modeling (MAM) methods learn audio representations by masking and reconstructing local spectrogram patches. However, the reconstruction loss mainly accounts for the signal-level quality of the reconstructed spectrogram and is still limited in extracting high-level audio semantics. In this paper, we propose to enhance the semantic modeling of MAM by distilling cross-modality knowledge from contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) representations for both masked and unmasked regions (MAM-CLAP) and leveraging a multi-objective learning strategy with a supervised classification branch (SupMAM), thereby providing more semantic knowledge for MAM and enabling it to effectively learn global features from labels. Experiments show that our methods significantly improve the performance on multiple downstream tasks. Furthermore, by combining our MAM-CLAP with SupMAM, we can achieve new state-of-the-art results on various audio and speech classification tasks, exceeding previous self-supervised learning and supervised pretraining methods.

Improving Audio-Text Retrieval via Hierarchical Cross-Modal Interaction and Auxiliary Captions

Most existing audio-text retrieval (ATR) methods focus on constructing contrastive pairs between whole audio clips and complete caption sentences, while ignoring fine-grained cross-modal relationships, e.g., short segments and phrases or frames and words. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical cross-modal interaction (HCI) method for ATR by simultaneously exploring clip-sentence, segment-phrase, and frame-word relationships, achieving a comprehensive multi-modal semantic comparison. Besides, we also present a novel ATR framework that leverages auxiliary captions (AC) generated by a pretrained captioner to perform feature interaction between audio and generated captions, which yields enhanced audio representations and is complementary to the original ATR matching branch. The audio and generated captions can also form new audio-text pairs as data augmentation for training. Experiments show that our HCI significantly improves the ATR performance. Moreover, our AC framework also shows stable performance gains on multiple datasets.

Improving Text-Audio Retrieval by Text-aware Attention Pooling and Prior Matrix Revised Loss

In text-audio retrieval (TAR) tasks, due to the heterogeneity of contents between text and audio, the semantic information contained in the text is only similar to certain frames within the audio. Yet, existing works aggregate the entire audio without considering the text, such as mean-pooling over the frames, which is likely to encode misleading audio information not described in the given text. In this paper, we present a text-aware attention pooling (TAP) module for TAR, which is essentially a scaled dot product attention for a text to attend to its most semantically similar frames. Furthermore, previous methods only conduct the softmax for every single-side retrieval, ignoring the potential cross-retrieval information. By exploring the intrinsic prior of each text-audio pair, we introduce a prior matrix revised (PMR) loss to filter the hard case with high (or low) text-to-audio but low (or high) audio-to-text similarity scores, thus achieving the dual optimal match. Experiments show that our TAP significantly outperforms various text-agnostic pooling functions. Moreover, our PMR loss also shows stable performance gains on multiple datasets.

Improving Weakly Supervised Sound Event Detection with Causal Intervention

Existing weakly supervised sound event detection (WSSED) work has not explored both types of co-occurrences simultaneously, i.e., some sound events often co-occur, and their occurrences are usually accompanied by specific background sounds, so they would be inevitably entangled, causing misclassification and biased localization results with only clip-level supervision. To tackle this issue, we first establish a structural causal model (SCM) to reveal that the context is the main cause of co-occurrence confounders that mislead the model to learn spurious correlations between frames and clip-level labels. Based on the causal analysis, we propose a causal intervention (CI) method for WSSED to remove the negative impact of co-occurrence confounders by iteratively accumulating every possible context of each class and then re-projecting the contexts to the frame-level features for making the event boundary clearer. Experiments show that our method effectively improves the performance on multiple datasets and can generalize to various baseline models.

Improving Speech Enhancement via Event-based Query

Existing deep learning based speech enhancement (SE) methods either use blind end-to-end training or explicitly incorporate speaker embedding or phonetic information into the SE network to enhance speech quality. In this paper, we perceive speech and noises as different types of sound events and propose an event-based query method for SE. Specifically, representative speech embeddings that can discriminate speech with noises are first pre-trained with the sound event detection (SED) task. The embeddings are then clustered into fixed golden speech queries to assist the SE network to enhance the speech from noisy audio. The golden speech queries can be obtained offline and generalizable to different SE datasets and networks. Therefore, little extra complexity is introduced and no enrollment is needed for each speaker. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields significant gains compared with baselines and the golden queries are well generalized to different datasets.