PolyBench: A Benchmark for Compositional Reasoning in Polyphonic Audio

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are increasingly capable of reasoning over audio. However, existing benchmarks provide limited coverage of reasoning in polyphonic audio, where multiple sound events co-occur and induce compositional structure. In this work, we introduce PolyBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate compositional reasoning in polyphonic audio. PolyBench comprises five evaluation subsets covering counting, classification, detection, concurrency, and duration estimation, requiring reasoning over multiple concurrent events and their relations. Evaluation of state-of-the-art LALMs reveals consistent performance degradation in polyphonic audio, indicating a fundamental bottleneck in current LALMs.

Temporally Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Acoustic event Classification

Multimodal acoustic event classification plays a key role in audio-visual systems. Although combining audio and visual signals improves recognition, it is still difficult to align them over time and to reduce the effect of noise across modalities. Existing methods often treat audio and visual streams separately, fusing features later with contrastive or mutual information objectives. Recent advances explore multimodal graph learning, but most fail to distinguish between intra- and inter-modal temporal dependencies. To address this, we propose Temporally Heterogeneous Graph-based Contrastive Learning (THGCL). Our framework constructs a temporal graph for each event, where audio and video segments form nodes and their temporal links form edges. We introduce Gaussian processes for intra-modal smoothness, Hawkes processes for inter-modal decay, and contrastive learning to capture fine-grained relationships. Experiments on AudioSet show that THGCL achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Noise-Robust Sound Event Detection and Counting via Language-Queried Sound Separation

Most sound event detection (SED) systems perform well on clean datasets but degrade significantly in noisy environments. Language-queried audio source separation (LASS) models show promise for robust SED by separating target events; existing methods require elaborate multi-stage training and lack explicit guidance for target events. To address these challenges, we introduce event appearance detection (EAD), a counting-based approach that counts event occurrences at both the clip and frame levels. Based on EAD, we propose a co-training-based multi-task learning framework for EAD and SED to enhance SED's performance in noisy environments. First, SED struggles to learn the same patterns as EAD. Then, a task-based constraint is designed to improve prediction consistency between SED and EAD. This framework provides more reliable clip-level predictions for LASS models and strengthens timestamp detection capability. Experiments on DESED and WildDESED datasets demonstrate better performance compared to existing methods, with advantages becoming more pronounced at higher noise levels.