GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities

Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Ashish Seth, Chandra Kiran Evuru, Utkarsh Tyagi, S Sakshi, Oriol Nieto, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha


Abstract
Perceiving and understanding non-speech sounds and non-verbal speech is essential to making decisions that help us interact with our surroundings. In this paper, we propose GAMA, a novel General-purpose Large Audio-Language Model (LALM) with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities. We build GAMA by integrating an LLM with multiple types of audio representations, including features from a custom Audio Q-Former, a multi-layer aggregator that aggregates features from multiple layers of an audio encoder. We fine-tune GAMA on a large-scale audio-language dataset, which augments it with audio understanding capabilities. Next, we propose CompA-R (Instruction-Tuning for Complex Audio Reasoning), a synthetically generated instruction-tuning (IT) dataset with instructions that require the model to perform complex reasoning on the input audio. We instruction-tune GAMA with CompA-R to endow it with complex reasoning abilities, where we further add a soft prompt as input with high-level semantic evidence by leveraging event tags of the input audio. Finally, we also propose CompA-R-test, a human-labeled evaluation dataset for evaluating the capabilities of LALMs on open-ended audio question-answering that requires complex reasoning. Through automated and expert human evaluations, we show that GAMA outperforms all other LALMs in literature on diverse audio understanding tasks by margins of 1%-84% and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on deductive reasoning and hallucination evaluation benchmarks. Further, GAMA IT-ed on CompA-R proves to be superior in its complex reasoning capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.361
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6288–6313
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.361
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Ashish Seth, Chandra Kiran Evuru, Utkarsh Tyagi, S Sakshi, Oriol Nieto, Ramani Duraiswami, and Dinesh Manocha. 2024. GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6288–6313, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities (Ghosh et al., EMNLP 2024)
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