MATS: An Audio Language Model under Text-only Supervision

TL;DR

MATS introduces a novel text-only training approach for audio-language models, enabling audio comprehension without audio data, by leveraging pre-trained alignment models and a new modality bridging mechanism.

Contribution

It proposes a new training strategy that uses only text supervision and pre-trained models to endow language models with audio understanding capabilities.

Findings

Achieves competitive performance with models trained on audio data

Demonstrates effective audio comprehension without audio training data

Introduces the Santa mechanism for modality bridging

Abstract

Large audio-language models (LALMs), built upon powerful Large Language Models (LLMs), have exhibited remarkable audio comprehension and reasoning capabilities. However, the training of LALMs demands a large corpus of audio-language pairs, which requires substantial costs in both data collection and training resources. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MATS}, an audio-language multimodal LLM designed to handle \textbf{M}ultiple \textbf{A}udio task using solely \textbf{T}ext-only \textbf{S}upervision. By leveraging pre-trained audio-language alignment models such as CLAP, we develop a text-only training strategy that projects the shared audio-language latent space into LLM latent space, endowing the LLM with audio comprehension capabilities without relying on audio data during training. To further bridge the modality gap between audio and language embeddings within CLAP, we propose the \textbf{S}trongly-rel\textbf{a}ted \textbf{n}oisy \textbf{t}ext with \textbf{a}udio (\textbf{Santa}) mechanism. Santa maps audio embeddings into CLAP language embedding space while preserving essential information from the audio input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MATS, despite being trained exclusively on text data, achieves competitive performance compared to recent LALMs trained on large-scale audio-language pairs. The code is publicly available in \href{https://github.com/wangwen-banban/MATS}{https://github.com/wangwen-banban/MATS}.