# Text-Queried Audio Source Separation via Hierarchical Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21025 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21025/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [Clotho: An Audio Captioning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09387/) (2019)
- [AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05734/) (2023)
- [FSD50K: An Open Dataset of Human-Labeled Sound Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00475/) (2020)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [Masked Autoencoders that Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06405/) (2022)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [Supervised Speech Separation Based on Deep Learning: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07524/) (2017)
- [Permutation Invariant Training of Deep Models for Speaker-Independent Multi-talker Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00325/) (2016)
- [Audio Flamingo: A Novel Audio Language Model with Few-Shot Learning and Dialogue Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01831/) (2024)
- [Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party: A Speaker-Independent Audio-Visual Model for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03619/) (2018)
- [UniAudio: An Audio Foundation Model Toward Universal Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00704/) (2023)
- [Co-Separating Sounds of Visual Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07750/) (2019)
- [Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Fast Maximum Likelihood Sampling Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13821/) (2021)
- [AUDIT: Audio Editing by Following Instructions with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00830/) (2023)
- [Generative Pre-Training for Speech with Autoregressive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12607/) (2019)
- [MAE-AST: Masked Autoencoding Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16691/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Target audio source separation with natural language queries presents a promising paradigm for extracting arbitrary audio events through arbitrary text descriptions. Existing methods mainly face two challenges, the difficulty in jointly modeling acoustic-textual alignment and semantic-aware separation within a blindly-learned single-stage architecture, and the reliance on large-scale accurately-labeled training data to compensate for inefficient cross-modal learning and separation. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical decomposition framework, HSM-TSS, that decouples the task into global-local semantic-guided feature separation and structure-preserving acoustic reconstruction. Our approach introduces a dual-stage mechanism for semantic separation, operating on distinct global and local semantic feature spaces. We first perform global-semantic separation through a global semantic feature space aligned with text queries. A Q-Audio architecture is employed to align audio and text modalities, serving as pretrained global-semantic encoders. Conditioned on the predicted global feature, we then perform the second-stage local-semantic separation on AudioMAE features that preserve time-frequency structures, followed by acoustic reconstruction. We also propose an instruction processing pipeline to parse arbitrary text queries into structured operations, extraction or removal, coupled with audio descriptions, enabling flexible sound manipulation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art separation performance with data-efficient training while maintaining superior semantic consistency with queries in complex auditory scenes.