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Are there any LLMs being widely used for audio classification? I know VLMs are being used a lot in image stuff.

It always seems kind of silly to me to throw everything at an LLM. I know they’re huge and can automatically handle a huge number of tasks but something in me finds it wasteful when we could be creating easily trainable, cheap to run bespoke models for a lot of stuff

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There are LLMs that support audio input, similar to those with vision support.

From my testing of open weights LLMs with audio support, they basically are only trained to recognize audio as an alternative to text input, they treat audio as basically equivalent to a transcript, and can't recognize or distinguish things like music, accents, background sounds, etc.

So they're only really good for transcribing or summarizing or using audio input in place of text input for prompts, but not anything that requires distinguishing any information about the audio that would not be present in a transcript.

It can be tempting to try to use an LLM for a variety of tasks; kind of the whole thing about an LLM is that you don't have to do a separate complex training run for every task, but can just provide instructions in natural language. But it only works as far as what the training data covers, if the training basically always treated audio and a text transcript as equivalent, the model has nothing causing it to learn other relevant features of the audio. If there's enough bird call identification in the training data of an LLM, it might be able to do that, but I think multimodal training data tends to be much more limited than the text training corpus

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Have you had any luck fine tuning one with musical data for classification or music-aware QA? I've been hacking on https://trebel.la/ which I would like to be a music practice companion, and the biggest missing feature is actually useful audio-based feedback pipeline.

My current approach, not yet validated, is trying to generate training data from masterclass recordings on Youtube, and then fine tuning MOSS-audio on a bunch of those. But I'm interested if there are better models, or large training sets I don't know about.

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More info please. Can I add this into birdnet go for more species detection?
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Note that while the underlying birdnet-go project started as BirdNET only, it can now use Google Perch v2, BattyBirdNET (for bats!) and other models in the future. It's a really cool project!
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Curious if there is a similar project for dog barks.
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I wanted to say that seems like a stretch but then I often find myself visualizing my best guess at the appearance, including species, of an unknown dog. It seems like size of dog and pitch of bark are negatively correlated
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