Pith. sign in

REVIEW 13 cited by

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2501.15177 v3 pith:SMFL4XYX submitted 2025-01-25 cs.SD cs.MMeess.AS

Audio-Language Models for Audio-Centric Tasks: A Systematic Survey

classification cs.SD cs.MMeess.AS
keywords almssystematicaudioaudio-centricaudio-languagemodelsresearchreview
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Audio-Language Models (ALMs), trained on paired audio-text data, are designed to process, understand, and reason about audio-centric multimodal content. Unlike traditional supervised approaches that use predefined labels, ALMs leverage natural language supervision to better handle complex real-world audio scenes with multiple overlapping events. While demonstrating impressive zero-shot and task generalization capabilities, there is still a notable lack of systematic surveys that comprehensively organize and analyze developments. In this paper, we present the first systematic review of ALMs with three main contributions: (1) comprehensive coverage of ALM works across speech, music, and sound from a general audio perspective; (2) a unified taxonomy of ALM foundations, including model architectures and training objectives; (3) establishment of a research landscape capturing mutual promotion and constraints among different research aspects, aiding in summarizing evaluations, limitations, concerns and promising directions. Our review contributes to helping researchers understand the development of existing technologies and future trends, while also providing valuable references for implementation in practical applications.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Benign Fine-Tuning Breaks Safety Alignment in Audio LLMs

    cs.CR 2026-04 conditional novelty 8.0

    Benign fine-tuning on audio data breaks safety alignment in Audio LLMs by raising jailbreak success rates up to 87%, with the dominant risk axis depending on model architecture and embedding proximity to harmful content.

  2. AOR-Bench: Do Large Audio Language Models Over-Refuse Pseudo-Harmful Queries?

    cs.SD 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Introduces the first benchmark for over-refusal in large audio language models using 3,000 pseudo-harmful audio samples and evaluates 12 models across six families, finding widespread over-refusal.

  3. PairAlign: A Framework for Sequence Tokenization via Self-Alignment with Applications to Audio Tokenization

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    PairAlign learns compact audio token sequences via self-alignment of paired content views using an autoregressive decoder, achieving strong cross-view consistency and edit-distance preservation while reducing token co...

  4. PairAlign: A Framework for Sequence Tokenization via Self-Alignment with Applications to Audio Tokenization

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    PairAlign learns compact variable-length token sequences for audio via self-alignment on paired content-preserving views, achieving 55% fewer archive tokens than VQ while preserving edit-distance retrieval at 12.71 tokens/s.

  5. MSU-Bench: Towards Speaker-Centric Understanding in Conversational Multi-Speaker Scenarios

    eess.AS 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MSU-Bench is a new two-tier benchmark covering speaker grounding to dialogue reasoning in multi-speaker conversations, with Gemini-assisted annotation and human verification.

  6. ELSA: Acoustic Event-Level Semantic Alignment for Fine-Grained Reference-Free Text-to-Audio Evaluation

    eess.AS 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ELSA introduces an event-level semantic alignment metric for reference-free text-to-audio evaluation that reports higher correlation with human ratings than CLAP-based baselines across four benchmarks.

  7. When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

    cs.SD 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Acquisition route affects forgetting rates in multimodal models, with text-pathway knowledge forgetting faster than audio-pathway knowledge in music understanding tasks.

  8. Learning When to Think While Listening in Large Audio-Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A wait-think-answer controller for LALMs is trained via SFT followed by six-reward DAPO, raising row-weighted accuracy from 67.6% to 70.3% and cutting post-endpoint thinking length by 14% on synthetic spoken QA while ...

  9. GlobeAudio: A Multilingual Multicultural Benchmark for Naturalistic Evaluation of Large Audio-Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    GlobeAudio is a new multilingual multicultural benchmark for naturalistic evaluation of large audio-language models, showing performance gaps especially for open-source models and low-resource languages.

  10. A Survey of Large Audio Language Models: Generalization, Trustworthiness, and Outlook

    cs.SD 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A survey of Large Audio Language Models that establishes a taxonomy of trustworthiness vulnerabilities and proposes a Defense-in-Depth roadmap for audio intelligence.

  11. Acoustic Cue Alignment in Audio Language Models for Speech Emotion Recognition

    cs.SD 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Aligned acoustic concept tokens from eGeMAPS improve UAR in ALM-based SER on FAU-Aibo and IEMOCAP while shuffled or corrupted tokens reduce performance without collapsing predictions, indicating partial anchoring to audio.

  12. Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Audio language models are benchmarked on five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks to reveal limitations in handling spoken audio evidence, accent variation, and domain shifts.

  13. A Survey of Audio Reasoning in Multimodal Foundation Models

    eess.AS 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    A survey that provides a unified formulation of audio reasoning and reviews advances across Audio-to-Text, Audio-to-Speech, Audio-Visual, and Agentic paradigms while discussing challenges and future directions.