Audio Captioning with BEATs, Conformer & BART

Winning model of DCASE Challenge 2023 Task 6A, with the follow-up publication:

• Improving Audio Captioning Models with Fine-grained Audio Features, Text Embedding Supervision, and LLM Mix-up Augmentation
  Shih-Lun Wu, Xuankai Chang, Gordon Wichern, Jee-weon Jung, François Germain, Jonathan Le Roux, and Shinji Watanabe
  Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2024
  [arXiv page] [DCASE results]
• BibTex citation

  @inproceedings{wu2024improving,
  title={Improving Audio Captioning Models with Fine-grained Audio Features, Text Embedding Supervision, and LLM Mix-up Augmentation},
  author={Wu, Shih-Lun and Chang, Xuankai and Wichern, Gordon and Jung, Jee-weon and Germain, Fran{\c{c}}ois and Le Roux, Jonathan and Watanabe, Shinji},
  booktitle={Proc. Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
  year={2024}
  }

Install Packages

• (Recommended) Create Conda environment with Python 3.9
• Install PyTorch with the correct CUDA version
• Install dependencies for SPICE metric

  cd caption_evaluation_tools/coco_caption
  bash get_stanford_models.sh
  cd ../../

• Install other dependencies

  pip install -r requirements.txt

Download Dataset & Pretrained Model

• Install p7zip (required for unpacking dataset)

  # if using conda
  conda install bioconda::p7zip
  # if installing to system
  # sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

• Download Clotho dataset

  bash download_clotho.sh

• Install Git-LFS

  # if using conda
  conda install conda-forge::git-lfs
  git-lfs install
  
  # if installing to system
  # curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/github/git-lfs/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
  # sudo apt-get install git-lfs
  # git-lfs install

• Get pretrained model (stored on HuggingFace)

  bash download_model.sh

Reproduce Best Model Results

• Run inference & evaluation code

  bash run_sampling_reranking.sh

  • metrics can then be found at ./exp/inference_evaluation_nucleus_t0.5_p95/inference_metrics.json

(Bonus) Augmented Dataset

Our 50K mix-up caption augmentations generated by ChatGPT (see paper Section 2.3 for details) can be found at:

• https://huggingface.co/datasets/slseanwu/clotho-chatgpt-mixup-50K

Acknowledgements

Our model/repository would not have been possible without the following great open-source works. Thank you so much!

• Clotho dataset: https://zenodo.org/records/4783391
• BEATs audio encoder: https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/beats
• INSTRUCTOR LM embeddings: https://github.com/xlang-ai/instructor-embedding
• Evaluation tools
  • coco-caption: https://github.com/tylin/coco-caption
  • caption-evaluation-tools: https://github.com/audio-captioning/caption-evaluation-tools
  • fense: https://github.com/felixgontier/dcase-2023-baseline/tree/main/fense