Generative models have shown significant achievements in audio generation tasks. However, existing models struggle with complex and detailed prompts, leading to potential performance degradation. We hypothesize that this problem stems from the simplicity and scarcity of the training data. This work aims to create a large-scale audio dataset with rich captions for improving audio generation models. We first develop an automated pipeline to generate detailed captions by transforming predicted visual captions, audio captions, and tagging labels into comprehensive descriptions using a Large Language Model (LLM). The resulting dataset, Sound-VECaps, comprises 1.66M high-quality audio-caption pairs with enriched details including audio event orders, occurred places and environment information. We then demonstrate that training the text-to-audio generation models with Sound-VECaps significantly improves the performance on complex prompts. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies of the models on several downstream audio-language tasks, showing the potential of Sound-VECaps in advancing audio-text representation learning. Our dataset and models are available online from here https://yyua8222.github.io/Sound-VECaps-demo/.
Automated Audio Captioning is a cross-modal task, generating natural language descriptions to summarize the audio clips' sound events. However, grounding the actual sound events in the given audio based on its corresponding caption has not been investigated. This paper contributes an AudioGrounding dataset, which provides the correspondence between sound events and the captions provided in Audiocaps, along with the location (timestamps) of each present sound event. Based on such, we propose the text-to-audio grounding (TAG) task, which interactively considers the relationship between audio pro…
Automatic Audio Captioning (AAC) refers to the task of translating an audio sample into a natural language (NL) text that describes the audio events, source of the events and their relationships. Unlike NL text generation tasks, which rely on metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR based on lexical semantics for evaluation, the AAC evaluation metric requires an ability to map NL text (phrases) that correspond to similar sounds in addition lexical semantics. Current metrics used for evaluation of AAC tasks lack an understanding of the perceived properties of sound represented by text. In this paper, w…
Audio captioning is a multi-modal task, focusing on using natural language for describing the contents of general audio. Most audio captioning methods are based on deep neural networks, employing an encoder-decoder scheme and a dataset with audio clips and corresponding natural language descriptions (i.e. captions). A significant challenge for audio captioning is the distribution of words in the captions: some words are very frequent but acoustically non-informative, i.e. the function words (e.g. "a", "the"), and other words are infrequent but informative, i.e. the content words (e.g. adjectiv…
Visually-Aware Audio Captioning With Adaptive Audio-Visual Attention
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；ByteDance（字节跳动）；Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Izmir Katip Celebi University（伊兹密尔卡蒂普·切莱比大学）
The goal of audio captioning is to translate input audio into its description using natural language. One of the problems in audio captioning is the lack of training data due to the difficulty in collecting audio-caption pairs by crawling the web. In this study, to overcome this problem, we propose to use a pre-trained large-scale language model. Since an audio input cannot be directly inputted into such a language model, we utilize guidance captions retrieved from a training dataset based on similarities that may exist in different audio. Then, the caption of the audio input is generated by u…
A major challenge in text-video and text-audio retrieval is the lack of large-scale training data. This is unlike image-captioning, where datasets are in the order of millions of samples. To close this gap we propose a new video mining pipeline which involves transferring captions from image captioning datasets to video clips with no additional manual effort. Using this pipeline, we create a new large-scale, weakly labelled audio-video captioning dataset consisting of millions of paired clips and captions. We show that training a multimodal transformed based model on this data achieves competi…
This technical report proposes an audio captioning system for DCASE 2021 Task 6 audio captioning challenge. Our proposed model is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU) using pretrained audio features and sound event detection. A pretrained neural network (PANN) is used to extract audio features and Word2Vec is selected with the aim of extracting word embeddings from the audio captions. To create semantically meaningful captions, we extract sound events from the audio clips and feed the encoder-decoder architecture with sound events in additi…
Automated audio captioning (AAC) has developed rapidly in recent years, involving acoustic signal processing and natural language processing to generate human-readable sentences for audio clips. The current models are generally based on the neural encoder-decoder architecture, and their decoder mainly uses acoustic information that is extracted from the CNN-based encoder. However, they have ignored semantic information that could help the AAC model to generate meaningful descriptions. This paper proposes a novel approach for automated audio captioning based on incorporating semantic and acoust…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP)（视觉、语音与信号处理中心（CVSSP））
Audio captioning aims at generating natural language descriptions for audio clips automatically. Existing audio captioning models have shown promising improvement in recent years. However, these models are mostly trained via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE),which tends to make captions generic, simple and deterministic. As different people may describe an audio clip from different aspects using distinct words and grammars, we argue that an audio captioning system should have the ability to generate diverse captions for a fixed audio clip and across similar audio clips. To address this probl…
Automated audio captioning (AAC) is a novel task, where a method takes as an input an audio sample and outputs a textual description (i.e. a caption) of its contents. Most AAC methods are adapted from from image captioning of machine translation fields. In this work we present a novel AAC novel method, explicitly focused on the exploitation of the temporal and time-frequency patterns in audio. We employ three learnable processes for audio encoding, two for extracting the local and temporal information, and one to merge the output of the previous two processes. To generate the caption, we emplo…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Ludong University（鲁东大学）
Audio captioning aims at describing the content of audio clips with human language. Due to the ambiguity of audio, different people may perceive the same audio differently, resulting in caption disparities (i.e., one audio may correlate to several captions with diverse semantics). For that, general audio captioning models achieve the one-to-many training by randomly selecting a correlated caption as the ground truth for each audio. However, it leads to a significant variation in the optimization directions and weakens the model stability. To eliminate this negative effect, in this paper, we pr…
Audio captioning is a novel field of multi-modal translation and it is the task of creating a textual description of the content of an audio signal (e.g. "people talking in a big room"). The creation of a dataset for this task requires a considerable amount of work, rendering the crowdsourcing a very attractive option. In this paper we present a three steps based framework for crowdsourcing an audio captioning dataset, based on concepts and practises followed for the creation of widely used image captioning and machine translations datasets. During the first step initial captions are gathered.…
Automated audio captioning is a cross-modal translation task that aims to generate natural language descriptions for given audio clips. This task has received increasing attention with the release of freely available datasets in recent years. The problem has been addressed predominantly with deep learning techniques. Numerous approaches have been proposed, such as investigating different neural network architectures, exploiting auxiliary information such as keywords or sentence information to guide caption generation, and employing different training strategies, which have greatly facilitated …
Captioning has attracted much attention in image and video understanding while a small amount of work examines audio captioning. This paper contributes a Mandarin-annotated dataset for audio captioning within a car scene. A sentence-level loss is proposed to be used in tandem with a GRU encoder-decoder model to generate captions with higher semantic similarity to human annotations. We evaluate the model on the newly-proposed Car dataset, a previously published Mandarin Hospital dataset and the Joint dataset, indicating its generalization capability across different scenes. An improvement in al…
Automated audio captioning aims at generating textual descriptions for an audio clip. To evaluate the quality of generated audio captions, previous works directly adopt image captioning metrics like SPICE and CIDEr, without justifying their suitability in this new domain, which may mislead the development of advanced models. This problem is still unstudied due to the lack of human judgment datasets on caption quality. Therefore, we firstly construct two evaluation benchmarks, AudioCaps-Eval and Clotho-Eval. They are established with pairwise comparison instead of absolute rating to achieve bet…
Increasing amount of research has shed light on machine perception of audio events, most of which concerns detection and classification tasks. However, human-like perception of audio scenes involves not only detecting and classifying audio sounds, but also summarizing the relationship between different audio events. Comparable research such as image caption has been conducted, yet the audio field is still quite barren. This paper introduces a manually-annotated dataset for audio caption. The purpose is to automatically generate natural sentences for audio scene description and to bridge the ga…
Audio captioning is the novel task of general audio content description using free text. It is an intermodal translation task (not speech-to-text), where a system accepts as an input an audio signal and outputs the textual description (i.e. the caption) of that signal. In this paper we present Clotho, a dataset for audio captioning consisting of 4981 audio samples of 15 to 30 seconds duration and 24 905 captions of eight to 20 words length, and a baseline method to provide initial results. Clotho is built with focus on audio content and caption diversity, and the splits of the data are not ham…
Automatic Audio Captioning (AAC) is the task that aims to describe an audio signal using natural language. AAC systems take as input an audio signal and output a free-form text sentence, called a caption. Evaluating such systems is not trivial, since there are many ways to express the same idea. For this reason, several complementary metrics, such as BLEU, CIDEr, SPICE and SPIDEr, are used to compare a single automatic caption to one or several captions of reference, produced by a human annotator. Nevertheless, an automatic system can produce several caption candidates, either using some rando…
We study the impact of visual assistance for automated audio captioning. Utilizing multi-encoder transformer architectures, which have previously been employed to introduce vision-related information in the context of sound event detection, we analyze the usefulness of incorporating a variety of pretrained features. We perform experiments on a YouTube-based audiovisual data set and investigate the effect of applying the considered transfer learning technique in terms of a variety of captioning metrics. We find that only one of the considered kinds of pretrained features provides consistent imp…
Language-based audio retrieval is a task, where natural language textual captions are used as queries to retrieve audio signals from a dataset. It has been first introduced into DCASE 2022 Challenge as Subtask 6B of task 6, which aims at developing computational systems to model relationships between audio signals and free-form textual descriptions. Compared with audio captioning (Subtask 6A), which is about generating audio captions for audio signals, language-based audio retrieval (Subtask 6B) focuses on ranking audio signals according to their relevance to natural language textual captions.…
Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Automated audio captioning aims to describe audio data with captions using natural language. Existing methods often employ an encoder-decoder structure, where the attention-based decoder (e.g., Transformer decoder) is widely used and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Although this method effectively captures global information within audio data via the self-attention mechanism, it may ignore the event with short time duration, due to its limitation in capturing local information in an audio signal, leading to inaccurate prediction of captions. To address this issue, we propose a method us…
Performance Improvement of Language-Queried Audio Source Separation Based on Caption Augmentation From Large Language Models for DCASE Challenge 2024 Task 9
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）；Aunion AI, Co. Ltd.（Aunion AI有限公司）
