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Main Authors: Liu, Meizhu, Rowe, Matthew, Agarwal, Amit, Avendi, Michael, Abbasi, Yassi, Patel, Hitesh Laxmichand, Li, Paul, Han, Kyu J., Sheng, Tao, Ravi, Sujith, Roth, Dan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23323
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author Liu, Meizhu
Rowe, Matthew
Agarwal, Amit
Avendi, Michael
Abbasi, Yassi
Patel, Hitesh Laxmichand
Li, Paul
Han, Kyu J.
Sheng, Tao
Ravi, Sujith
Roth, Dan
author_facet Liu, Meizhu
Rowe, Matthew
Agarwal, Amit
Avendi, Michael
Abbasi, Yassi
Patel, Hitesh Laxmichand
Li, Paul
Han, Kyu J.
Sheng, Tao
Ravi, Sujith
Roth, Dan
contents Audio-text retrieval enables semantic alignment between audio content and natural language queries, supporting applications in multimedia search, accessibility, and surveillance. However, current state-of-the-art approaches struggle with long, noisy, and weakly labeled audio due to their reliance on contrastive learning and large-batch training. We propose a novel multimodal retrieval framework that refines audio and text embeddings using a cross-modal embedding refinement module combining transformer-based projection, linear mapping, and bidirectional attention. To further improve robustness, we introduce a hybrid loss function blending cosine similarity, $\mathcal{L}_{1}$, and contrastive objectives, enabling stable training even under small-batch constraints. Our approach efficiently handles long-form and noisy audio (SNR 5 to 15) via silence-aware chunking and attention-based pooling. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate improvements over prior methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_23323
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Audio-Text Retrieval via Cross-Modal Attention and Hybrid Loss
Liu, Meizhu
Rowe, Matthew
Agarwal, Amit
Avendi, Michael
Abbasi, Yassi
Patel, Hitesh Laxmichand
Li, Paul
Han, Kyu J.
Sheng, Tao
Ravi, Sujith
Roth, Dan
Computation and Language
Sound
Audio-text retrieval enables semantic alignment between audio content and natural language queries, supporting applications in multimedia search, accessibility, and surveillance. However, current state-of-the-art approaches struggle with long, noisy, and weakly labeled audio due to their reliance on contrastive learning and large-batch training. We propose a novel multimodal retrieval framework that refines audio and text embeddings using a cross-modal embedding refinement module combining transformer-based projection, linear mapping, and bidirectional attention. To further improve robustness, we introduce a hybrid loss function blending cosine similarity, $\mathcal{L}_{1}$, and contrastive objectives, enabling stable training even under small-batch constraints. Our approach efficiently handles long-form and noisy audio (SNR 5 to 15) via silence-aware chunking and attention-based pooling. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate improvements over prior methods.
title Robust Audio-Text Retrieval via Cross-Modal Attention and Hybrid Loss
topic Computation and Language
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23323