Automated Audio Captioning: An Overview of Recent Progress and New Challenges
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Abstract (arXiv)
Automated audio captioning is a cross-modal translation task that aims to generate natural language descriptions for given audio clips. This task has received increasing attention with the release of freely available datasets in recent years. The problem has been addressed predominantly with deep learning techniques. Numerous approaches have been proposed, such as investigating different neural network architectures, exploiting auxiliary information such as keywords or sentence information to guide caption generation, and employing different training strategies, which have greatly facilitated the development of this field. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the published contributions in automated audio captioning, from a variety of existing approaches to evaluation metrics and datasets. We also discuss open challenges and envisage possible future research directions.
Key facts. Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 70 of its 109 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 May 2022.
Builds on
70 of 109 references.
References · 70
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 6; 2024: 4; 2025: 7; 2026: 3.
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- 2023WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Researchcited by 266
- 2023Separate Anything You Describecited by 43
- 2023Auto-ACD: A Large-scale Dataset for Audio-Language Representation Learningcited by 32
- 2022Visually-Aware Audio Captioning With Adaptive Audio-Visual Attentioncited by 11
- 2025TACOS: Temporally-aligned Audio CaptiOnS for Language-Audio Pretrainingcited by 9
- 2023StyleCap: Automatic Speaking-Style Captioning from Speech Based on Speech and Language Self-supervised Learning Modelscited by 7
- 2023Typing to Listen at the Cocktail Party: Text-Guided Target Speaker Extractioncited by 6
- 2024Enhancing Temporal Understanding in Audio Question Answering for Large Audio Language Modelscited by 5
- 2025AnyCap Project: A Unified Framework, Dataset, and Benchmark for Controllable Omni-modal Captioningcited by 5
- 2022Towards Generating Diverse Audio Captions via Adversarial Trainingcited by 3
- 2025Mitigating Audiovisual Mismatch in Visual-Guide Audio Captioningcited by 3
- 2025CLAP-ART: Automated Audio Captioning with Semantic-rich Audio Representation Tokenizercited by 3
10 more
- 2025Multiple Choice Learning of Low-Rank Adapters for Language Modelingcited by 2
- 2024Describe Where You Are: Improving Noise-Robustness for Speech Emotion Recognition with Text Description of the Environmentcited by 1
- 2024EmotionCaps: Enhancing Audio Captioning Through Emotion-Augmented Data Generationcited by 1
- 2025AC/DC: LLM-based Audio Comprehension via Dialogue Continuationcited by 1
- 2025MAGIC-Enhanced Keyword Prompting for Zero-Shot Audio Captioning with CLIP Modelscited by 1
- 2023Audio Difference Learning for Audio Captioningcited by 0
- 2024AudioSetMix: Enhancing Audio-Language Datasets with LLM-Assisted Augmentationscited by 0
- 2026An Evaluation Framework for Structured Audio Captions Validated by Controlled Perturbationscited by 0
- 2026SonicCaps: Large-Scale Diverse and Fine-Grained Captioning for Improved Audio-Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026AVSD-Scenes: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Description of Urban Scenescited by 0
- 2026AVSD-Scenes: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Description of Urban Scenes1 Oct 2026
- 2026SonicCaps: Large-Scale Diverse and Fine-Grained Captioning for Improved Audio-Retrieval2 Sep 2026
- 2026An Evaluation Framework for Structured Audio Captions Validated by Controlled Perturbations23 Jul 2026
- 2025MAGIC-Enhanced Keyword Prompting for Zero-Shot Audio Captioning with CLIP Models16 Sep 2025
- 2025AnyCap Project: A Unified Framework, Dataset, and Benchmark for Controllable Omni-modal Captioning17 Jul 2025
- 2025Multiple Choice Learning of Low-Rank Adapters for Language Modeling14 Jul 2025
- 2025AC/DC: LLM-based Audio Comprehension via Dialogue Continuation12 Jun 2025
- 2025CLAP-ART: Automated Audio Captioning with Semantic-rich Audio Representation Tokenizer1 Jun 2025
- 2025Mitigating Audiovisual Mismatch in Visual-Guide Audio Captioning28 May 2025
- 2025TACOS: Temporally-aligned Audio CaptiOnS for Language-Audio Pretraining12 May 2025
- 2024EmotionCaps: Enhancing Audio Captioning Through Emotion-Augmented Data Generation15 Oct 2024
- 2024Enhancing Temporal Understanding in Audio Question Answering for Large Audio Language Models10 Sep 2024
10 more
- 2024Describe Where You Are: Improving Noise-Robustness for Speech Emotion Recognition with Text Description of the Environment25 Jul 2024
- 2024AudioSetMix: Enhancing Audio-Language Datasets with LLM-Assisted Augmentations17 May 2024
- 2023StyleCap: Automatic Speaking-Style Captioning from Speech Based on Speech and Language Self-supervised Learning Models28 Nov 2023
- 2023Typing to Listen at the Cocktail Party: Text-Guided Target Speaker Extraction11 Oct 2023
- 2023Auto-ACD: A Large-scale Dataset for Audio-Language Representation Learning20 Sep 2023
- 2023Audio Difference Learning for Audio Captioning15 Sep 2023
- 2023Separate Anything You Describe9 Aug 2023
- 2023WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research30 Mar 2023
- 2022Towards Generating Diverse Audio Captions via Adversarial Training5 Dec 2022
- 2022Visually-Aware Audio Captioning With Adaptive Audio-Visual Attention28 Oct 2022
- 2023WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Researchcited by 266
- 2023Separate Anything You Describecited by 43
- 2023Auto-ACD: A Large-scale Dataset for Audio-Language Representation Learningcited by 32
- 2022Visually-Aware Audio Captioning With Adaptive Audio-Visual Attentioncited by 11
- 2025TACOS: Temporally-aligned Audio CaptiOnS for Language-Audio Pretrainingcited by 9
- 2023StyleCap: Automatic Speaking-Style Captioning from Speech Based on Speech and Language Self-supervised Learning Modelscited by 7
- 2023Typing to Listen at the Cocktail Party: Text-Guided Target Speaker Extractioncited by 6
- 2024Enhancing Temporal Understanding in Audio Question Answering for Large Audio Language Modelscited by 5
- 2025AnyCap Project: A Unified Framework, Dataset, and Benchmark for Controllable Omni-modal Captioningcited by 5
- 2022Towards Generating Diverse Audio Captions via Adversarial Trainingcited by 3
- 2025Mitigating Audiovisual Mismatch in Visual-Guide Audio Captioningcited by 3
- 2025CLAP-ART: Automated Audio Captioning with Semantic-rich Audio Representation Tokenizercited by 3
12 most cited of 22 All 22 (JSON)
- 2026AVSD-Scenes: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Description of Urban Scenes1 Oct 2026
- 2026SonicCaps: Large-Scale Diverse and Fine-Grained Captioning for Improved Audio-Retrieval2 Sep 2026
- 2026An Evaluation Framework for Structured Audio Captions Validated by Controlled Perturbations23 Jul 2026
- 2025MAGIC-Enhanced Keyword Prompting for Zero-Shot Audio Captioning with CLIP Models16 Sep 2025
- 2025AnyCap Project: A Unified Framework, Dataset, and Benchmark for Controllable Omni-modal Captioning17 Jul 2025
- 2025Multiple Choice Learning of Low-Rank Adapters for Language Modeling14 Jul 2025
- 2025AC/DC: LLM-based Audio Comprehension via Dialogue Continuation12 Jun 2025
- 2025CLAP-ART: Automated Audio Captioning with Semantic-rich Audio Representation Tokenizer1 Jun 2025
- 2025Mitigating Audiovisual Mismatch in Visual-Guide Audio Captioning28 May 2025
- 2025TACOS: Temporally-aligned Audio CaptiOnS for Language-Audio Pretraining12 May 2025
- 2024EmotionCaps: Enhancing Audio Captioning Through Emotion-Augmented Data Generation15 Oct 2024
- 2024Enhancing Temporal Understanding in Audio Question Answering for Large Audio Language Models10 Sep 2024
12 newest of 22 All 22 (JSON)