Papers for

audio ai developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Large audio models improve task flexibility with adapter generation

In-Context Adapter Generation for Compositional Generalization in Large Audio Language Models

Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) have achieved strong performance on standard speech and audio understanding tasks, yet their ability to systematically generalize to novel task compositions remains underexplored. Taking a meta-learning view, we extend Text-to-LoRA (T2L) to LALMs, generating instruction-conditioned LoRA adapters with a Transformer hypernetwork rather than learning a single fixed adapter shared across instructions. To exploit fine-grained task information, we introduce in-context adapter generation (ICAG), a token-level hypernetwork architecture; we call the resulting method T2L-ICAG. We evaluate this approach on two representative LALMs using SIFT-50M for supervised fine-tuning and construct a controlled compositional evaluation suite covering five task classes. Across two LALM backbones, T2L-ICAG consistently improves over static LoRA and also the global embedding-based T2L baseline. Coverage and capacity analyses further show that these gains are larger on structurally out-of-domain tasks and cannot be explained by parameter count alone. These results suggest that generating task-specific adapters from instructions is a promising direction for improving compositional generalization of LALMs.

Sun 25 OctArtificial IntelligenceSound
The gist
Large audio language models are good at understanding speech but struggle when faced with new, combined tasks. The authors found a way to help these models handle new tasks better by creating small, task-specific adapter modules that change based on the instructions given. They built a special system called T2L-ICAG that generates these adapters in context for each task. Tests showed this method works better than earlier approaches, especially for tasks that are very different from what the model has seen before.
Open → 2610.34413v1

Audio language model reveals hidden signals linked to dog barking sounds

When Does the Concept of "Dog" Emerge in an Audio LLM?

Abstract: Multimodal large language models answer audio questions, but how they represent auditory semantics and use them in decisions remains unclear, limiting our understanding of response formation. We study dog barking in Qwen2.5-Omni-7B using Jacobian lens (J-lens) readout and directional interventions. We define the dog direction as a J-lens-derived hidden-state vector associated with dog; adding or removing its component modulates dog-related information. We find this information decodable without dog/bark prompt cues or animal-identification requirements. Directional interventions change response tendencies and some final answers, with effects concentrated in late-layer states immediately before generation across species classification, vocalization classification, and sound description. The dog direction shows no comparable advantage over controls in animal/other classification. These results provide causal-intervention evidence that the dog direction affects output scores in a task-dependent manner, most consistently at L22 and L24 immediately before generation.

Sun 27 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Figuring out how AI models understand sounds like dog barks is challenging. The authors studied a large audio language model and found a specific hidden signal that relates to the concept of a dog barking. By adding or removing this signal, they could change how the model responded to questions about dog sounds. This signal became most important just before the model gave its final answer. The work helps show how audio models represent and use sound meanings internally.
Open → 2609.33458v1