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Main Authors: Wijngaard, Gijs, Formisano, Elia, Esposito, Michele, Dumontier, Michel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14142
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author Wijngaard, Gijs
Formisano, Elia
Esposito, Michele
Dumontier, Michel
author_facet Wijngaard, Gijs
Formisano, Elia
Esposito, Michele
Dumontier, Michel
contents Audio-language models have shown promising results in various sound understanding tasks, yet they remain limited in their ability to reason over the fine-grained semantics of sound. In this paper, we present AudSemThinker, a model whose reasoning is structured around a framework of auditory semantics inspired by human cognition. To support this, we introduce AudSem, a novel dataset specifically curated for semantic descriptor reasoning in audio-language models. AudSem addresses the persistent challenge of data contamination in zero-shot evaluations by providing a carefully filtered collection of audio samples paired with captions generated through a robust multi-stage pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that AudSemThinker outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple training settings, highlighting its strength in semantic audio reasoning. Both AudSemThinker and the AudSem dataset are released publicly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14142
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AudSemThinker: Enhancing Audio-Language Models through Reasoning over Semantics of Sound
Wijngaard, Gijs
Formisano, Elia
Esposito, Michele
Dumontier, Michel
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Audio-language models have shown promising results in various sound understanding tasks, yet they remain limited in their ability to reason over the fine-grained semantics of sound. In this paper, we present AudSemThinker, a model whose reasoning is structured around a framework of auditory semantics inspired by human cognition. To support this, we introduce AudSem, a novel dataset specifically curated for semantic descriptor reasoning in audio-language models. AudSem addresses the persistent challenge of data contamination in zero-shot evaluations by providing a carefully filtered collection of audio samples paired with captions generated through a robust multi-stage pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that AudSemThinker outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple training settings, highlighting its strength in semantic audio reasoning. Both AudSemThinker and the AudSem dataset are released publicly.
title AudSemThinker: Enhancing Audio-Language Models through Reasoning over Semantics of Sound
topic Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14142