David's committee is as follows: Karthik Narasimhan (adviser) and Adam Finkelstein (reader)
Abstract:
Multi-modal learning in the audio-language domain has seen significant advancements in recent years. However, audio-language learning faces challenges due to limited and lower-quality data compared to image-language tasks. Existing audio-language datasets are notably smaller, and manual labeling is hindered by the need to listen to entire audio clips for accurate labeling.
Our method systematically generates audio-caption pairs by augmenting audio clips with natural language labels and corresponding audio signal processing operations. Leveraging a Large Language Model, we generate descriptions of augmented audio clips with a prompt template. This scalable method produces AudioSetMix, a high-quality training dataset for text-and-audio related models.
Integration of our dataset improves models performance on benchmarks by providing diversified and better-aligned examples. Notably, our dataset addresses the absence of modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) in existing datasets. By enabling models to learn these concepts, and generating hard negative examples during training, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.