Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities

Sreyan Ghosh, Zhifeng Kong, Sonal Kumar, S Sakshi, Jaehyeon Kim, Wei Ping, Rafael Valle, Dinesh Manocha, Bryan Catanzaro
Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 267:19358-19405, 2025.

Abstract

Understanding and reasoning over non-speech sounds and music are crucial for both humans and AI agents to interact effectively with their environments. In this paper, we introduce Audio Flamingo 2 (AF2), an Audio-Language Model (ALM) with advanced audio understanding and reasoning capabilities. AF2 leverages (i) a custom CLAP model, (ii) synthetic Audio QA data for fine-grained audio reasoning, and (iii) a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy. AF2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with only a 3B parameter small language model, surpassing large open-source and proprietary models across over 20 benchmarks. Next, for the first time, we extend audio understanding to long audio segments (30 secs to 5 mins) and propose LongAudio, a large and novel dataset for training ALMs on long audio captioning and question-answering tasks. Fine-tuning AF2 on LongAudio leads to exceptional performance on our proposed LongAudioBench, an expert-annotated benchmark for evaluating ALMs on long audio understanding capabilities. We conduct extensive ablation studies to confirm the efficacy of our approach.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v267-ghosh25b, title = {Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities}, author = {Ghosh, Sreyan and Kong, Zhifeng and Kumar, Sonal and Sakshi, S and Kim, Jaehyeon and Ping, Wei and Valle, Rafael and Manocha, Dinesh and Catanzaro, Bryan}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {19358--19405}, year = {2025}, editor = {Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry}, volume = {267}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {13--19 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v267/main/assets/ghosh25b/ghosh25b.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/ghosh25b.html}, abstract = {Understanding and reasoning over non-speech sounds and music are crucial for both humans and AI agents to interact effectively with their environments. In this paper, we introduce Audio Flamingo 2 (AF2), an Audio-Language Model (ALM) with advanced audio understanding and reasoning capabilities. AF2 leverages (i) a custom CLAP model, (ii) synthetic Audio QA data for fine-grained audio reasoning, and (iii) a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy. AF2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with only a 3B parameter small language model, surpassing large open-source and proprietary models across over 20 benchmarks. Next, for the first time, we extend audio understanding to long audio segments (30 secs to 5 mins) and propose LongAudio, a large and novel dataset for training ALMs on long audio captioning and question-answering tasks. Fine-tuning AF2 on LongAudio leads to exceptional performance on our proposed LongAudioBench, an expert-annotated benchmark for evaluating ALMs on long audio understanding capabilities. We conduct extensive ablation studies to confirm the efficacy of our approach.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities %A Sreyan Ghosh %A Zhifeng Kong %A Sonal Kumar %A S Sakshi %A Jaehyeon Kim %A Wei Ping %A Rafael Valle %A Dinesh Manocha %A Bryan Catanzaro %B Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2025 %E Aarti Singh %E Maryam Fazel %E Daniel Hsu %E Simon Lacoste-Julien %E Felix Berkenkamp %E Tegan Maharaj %E Kiri Wagstaff %E Jerry Zhu %F pmlr-v267-ghosh25b %I PMLR %P 19358--19405 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/ghosh25b.html %V 267 %X Understanding and reasoning over non-speech sounds and music are crucial for both humans and AI agents to interact effectively with their environments. In this paper, we introduce Audio Flamingo 2 (AF2), an Audio-Language Model (ALM) with advanced audio understanding and reasoning capabilities. AF2 leverages (i) a custom CLAP model, (ii) synthetic Audio QA data for fine-grained audio reasoning, and (iii) a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy. AF2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with only a 3B parameter small language model, surpassing large open-source and proprietary models across over 20 benchmarks. Next, for the first time, we extend audio understanding to long audio segments (30 secs to 5 mins) and propose LongAudio, a large and novel dataset for training ALMs on long audio captioning and question-answering tasks. Fine-tuning AF2 on LongAudio leads to exceptional performance on our proposed LongAudioBench, an expert-annotated benchmark for evaluating ALMs on long audio understanding capabilities. We conduct extensive ablation studies to confirm the efficacy of our approach.
APA
Ghosh, S., Kong, Z., Kumar, S., Sakshi, S., Kim, J., Ping, W., Valle, R., Manocha, D. & Catanzaro, B.. (2025). Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 267:19358-19405 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/ghosh25b.html.

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