2024/12/31 by Nishit Anand, Ashish Seth, Anand, Nishit +5
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.00398
openalex publication_date 2024/12/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Audio-language models (ALMs) excel in zero-shot audio classification, a task where models classify previously unseen audio clips at test time by leveraging descriptive natural language prompts. We introduce TSPE (Task-Specific Prompt Ensemble), a simple, training-free hard prompting method that boosts ALEs' zero-shot performance by customizing prompts for diverse audio classification tasks. Rather than using generic template-based prompts like "Sound of a car" we generate context-rich prompts, such as "Sound of a car coming from a tunnel". Specifically, we leverage label information to identify suitable sound attributes, such as "loud" and "feeble", and appropriate sound sources, such as "tunnel" and "street" and incorporate this information into the prompts used by Audio-Language Models (ALMs) for audio classification. Further, to enhance audio-text alignment, we perform prompt ensemble across TSPE-generated task-specific prompts. When evaluated on 12 diverse audio classification datasets, TSPE improves performance across ALMs by showing an absolute improvement of 1.23-16.36% over vanilla zero-shot evaluation.