CLAIRA: A Simple and Interpretable Measure for Evaluating Audio Captions Using Large Language Models

Khái niệm cốt lõi

CLAIRA is a simple and flexible method that leverages the zero-shot capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate candidate audio captions by directly asking LLMs for a semantic distance score, providing an interpretable justification for the score.

Tóm tắt

The paper introduces CLAIRA, a novel approach for evaluating audio captions that leverages large language models (LLMs). The key insights are:

1. CLAIRA uses in-context learning to convert audio caption evaluation into a text-completion task, which is then solved using an off-the-shelf LLM like GPT-4. This allows CLAIRA to directly assess the semantic similarity between a candidate caption and a set of reference captions.

2. To ensure the LLM generates a valid JSON output with both a numeric score and a natural language justification, CLAIRA uses efficient guided generation techniques.

3. CLAIRA outperforms existing general-purpose and domain-specific metrics in terms of correlation with human judgments of caption quality, achieving up to 5.8% relative accuracy improvement over the FENSE metric and up to 11% over the best general-purpose measure on the Clotho-Eval dataset.

4. The natural language justifications provided by CLAIRA are rated up to 30% higher in quality by human evaluators compared to baseline methods, making the measure more interpretable.

5. CLAIRA is shown to transfer flexibly to new languages with minimal or no adaptation, maintaining high accuracy on multilingual data.

6. The paper also explores different tie-breaking methods to address the issue of equally good or bad captions receiving identical scores from the LLM.

Overall, CLAIRA demonstrates that a simple, LLM-based approach can outperform more complex, domain-specific measures for audio caption evaluation, while also providing interpretable reasoning for the assigned scores.

Thống kê

"the rain is falling heavily onto the road"
"with background rain vehicles drive by on the pavement splashing water with their tires as they pass"
"as rain falls five vehicles drive by splashing water from the pavement as they pass by"
"cars passing by with a light rainfall in the background"
"the rain is falling heavily in the road"

Trích dẫn

"CLAIRA better predicts human judgments of quality compared to traditional metrics, with a 5.8% relative accuracy improvement compared to the domain-specific FENSE metric and up to 11% over the best general-purpose measure on the Clotho-Eval dataset."
"CLAIRA offers more transparency by allowing the language model to explain the reasoning behind its scores, with these explanations rated up to 30% better by human evaluators than those provided by baseline methods."

Thông tin chi tiết chính được chắt lọc từ

CLAIR-A: Leveraging Large Language Models to Judge Audio Captions

by Tsung-Han Wu... lúc arxiv.org 09-20-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12962.pdf

Yêu cầu sâu hơn

How can CLAIRA be extended to handle more complex audio scenes with multiple sound sources and interactions?

To extend CLAIRA for evaluating more complex audio scenes with multiple sound sources and interactions, several strategies can be employed:

Multi-Modal Input Integration: Incorporate additional modalities such as visual data or contextual information about the audio scene. By leveraging video or images alongside audio, CLAIRA can better understand the interactions between different sound sources, enhancing its evaluation capabilities.

Hierarchical Scoring System: Develop a hierarchical scoring system that assesses different layers of audio complexity. For instance, CLAIRA could evaluate individual sound sources first and then assess their interactions, providing a more nuanced score that reflects the complexity of the audio scene.

Enhanced Prompt Engineering: Modify the prompts given to the LLM to explicitly request evaluations of interactions between multiple sound sources. This could involve asking the model to identify and describe how different sounds influence each other, thereby capturing the dynamics of the audio scene more effectively.

Contextual Awareness: Implement mechanisms that allow CLAIRA to consider the temporal aspects of audio, such as the sequence of sounds and their relative timing. This could involve using temporal embeddings or recurrent structures to capture the flow of audio events over time.

Training on Diverse Datasets: Train CLAIRA on datasets that include a wide variety of complex audio scenes, ensuring that the model learns to recognize and evaluate interactions among multiple sound sources. This could involve curating datasets that specifically focus on multi-source audio scenarios.

By integrating these strategies, CLAIRA can evolve into a more robust tool for evaluating complex audio scenes, ultimately improving its accuracy and relevance in real-world applications.

What are the limitations of using LLMs for audio caption evaluation, and how can they be addressed?

While LLMs like CLAIRA offer significant advantages in audio caption evaluation, they also have notable limitations:

Contextual Limitations: LLMs may struggle with understanding the full context of an audio scene, especially if the audio contains subtle nuances or cultural references that are not explicitly stated in the captions. To address this, incorporating additional contextual information or training the model on diverse cultural datasets can enhance its understanding.

Dependence on Training Data: The performance of LLMs is heavily reliant on the quality and diversity of the training data. If the training data lacks examples of certain audio types or contexts, the model may not generalize well. To mitigate this, continuous updates and expansions of the training dataset are necessary, including diverse audio samples and captions.

Interpretation of Ambiguity: LLMs may misinterpret ambiguous audio scenes or captions, leading to inaccurate evaluations. Implementing a multi-tiered scoring system that allows for the assessment of ambiguity and uncertainty can help provide more reliable evaluations.

Scalability Issues: Evaluating large datasets with LLMs can be computationally expensive and time-consuming. To address this, optimizing the evaluation process through batch processing or using smaller, more efficient models for preliminary evaluations can improve scalability.

Lack of Domain-Specific Knowledge: LLMs may not possess the specialized knowledge required for certain audio domains, such as medical or technical audio. Incorporating domain-specific training or fine-tuning the model on specialized datasets can enhance its performance in these areas.

By recognizing and addressing these limitations, the effectiveness of LLMs in audio caption evaluation can be significantly improved, leading to more accurate and reliable assessments.

How can the interpretability of CLAIRA be further improved to provide more detailed and actionable feedback for audio captioning model development?

Improving the interpretability of CLAIRA to provide more detailed and actionable feedback can be achieved through several approaches:

Detailed Justification Mechanisms: Enhance the justification output of CLAIRA by requiring the LLM to provide specific examples from the audio scene that support its scoring. This could involve asking the model to highlight particular sounds or interactions that influenced its evaluation, making the feedback more actionable.

Visualizations of Evaluation Criteria: Develop visual tools that represent the evaluation criteria used by CLAIRA. For instance, creating heatmaps or graphs that illustrate how different aspects of the audio scene (e.g., clarity, interaction, context) contributed to the final score can help developers understand areas for improvement.

User-Friendly Feedback Reports: Generate comprehensive feedback reports that summarize the evaluation process, including strengths and weaknesses of the candidate captions. These reports could include suggestions for improving audio captioning models based on the evaluation results.

Interactive Feedback Systems: Implement interactive systems where users can query CLAIRA for more information about specific scores or justifications. This could involve a dialogue interface where developers can ask follow-up questions about the evaluation, leading to deeper insights.

Incorporation of User Feedback: Allow users to provide feedback on the justifications generated by CLAIRA. By collecting user insights on the clarity and usefulness of the feedback, CLAIRA can be iteratively improved to better meet the needs of audio captioning model developers.

By focusing on these strategies, CLAIRA can enhance its interpretability, providing developers with the detailed and actionable feedback necessary for refining and improving audio captioning models.