# NAACA: Training-Free NeuroAuditory Attentive Cognitive Architecture with Oscillatory Working Memory for Salience-Driven Attention Gating

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13651 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13651/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

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

- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Failing Loudly: An Empirical Study of Methods for Detecting Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11953/) (2018)
- [Not only Look, but also Listen: Learning Multimodal Violence Detection under Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04687/) (2020)
- [MA-LMM: Memory-Augmented Large Multimodal Model for Long-Term Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05726/) (2024)
- [Dispider: Enabling Video LLMs with Active Real-Time Interaction via Disentangled Perception, Decision, and Reaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03218/) (2025)
- [VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11681/) (2023)
- [Holmes-VAU: Towards Long-term Video Anomaly Understanding at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06171/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Concept Drift Detection from Deep Learning Representations in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17813/) (2024)
- [Online Drift Detection with Maximum Concept Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05375/) (2024)
- [AVadCLIP: Audio-Visual Collaboration for Robust Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04495/) (2025)
- [AudioLog: LLMs-Powered Long Audio Logging with Hybrid Token-Semantic Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12371/) (2023)
- [TRACES: Temporal Recall with Contextual Embeddings for Real-Time Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00580/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio provides critical situational cues, yet current Audio Language Models (ALMs) face an attention bottleneck in long-form recordings where dominant background patterns can dilute rare, salient events. We introduce NAACA, a training-free NeuroAuditory Attentive Cognitive Architecture that reframes attention allocation as an auditory salience filtering problem. At its core is OWM, a neuro-inspired Oscillatory Working Memory that maintains stable attractor-like states and triggers higher-cognition ALM processing only when adaptive energy fluctuations signal perceptual salience, triggering higher-level reasoning. On XD-Violence, NAACA improves AudioQwen's average precision (AP) from 53.50% to 70.60% while reducing unnecessary ALM invocations. Furthermore, qualitative case studies on the Urban Soundscapes of the World (USoW) dataset show that OWM captures novel events and subcategory shifts while remaining robust to transient pauses and ambient urban noise.