# AISTAT lab system for DCASE2025 Task6: Language-based audio retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16649 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16649/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09058/) (2022)
- [Clotho: An Audio Captioning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09387/) (2019)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [Efficient Training of Audio Transformers with Patchout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05069/) (2021)
- [Audio Retrieval with Natural Language Queries: A Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09418/) (2021)
- [EAT: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Efficient Audio Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03497/) (2024)
- [Improving Audio Captioning Models with Fine-grained Audio Features, Text Embedding Supervision, and LLM Mix-up Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17352/) (2023)
- [Estimated Audio-Caption Correspondences Improve Language-Based Audio Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11641/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [COMET: Concept Space Dissection of the Modality Gap in Audio-Text Multimodal Contrastive Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29628/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This report presents the AISTAT team's submission to the language-based audio retrieval task in DCASE 2025 Task 6. Our proposed system employs dual encoder architecture, where audio and text modalities are encoded separately, and their representations are aligned using contrastive learning. Drawing inspiration from methodologies of the previous year's challenge, we implemented a distillation approach and leveraged large language models (LLMs) for effective data augmentation techniques, including back-translation and LLM mix. Additionally, we incorporated clustering to introduce an auxiliary classification task for further finetuning. Our best single system achieved a mAP@16 of 46.62, while an ensemble of four systems reached a mAP@16 of 48.83 on the Clotho development test split.