From Contrast to Commonality: Audio Commonality Captioning for Enhanced Audio-Text Cross-modal Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

Abstract: Audio Captioning (AC) plays a pivotal role in enhancing audio-text cross-modal understanding during the pretraining and finetuning of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). To further strengthen this alignment, recent works have proposed Audio Difference Captioning (ADC), which takes multiple audio inputs and encourages the model to describe their differences, thereby promoting fine-grained audio discrimination. However, despite its effectiveness in enabling difference-telling and detailed discrimination, ADC introduces a notable semantic gap between the input audios-often rich in diverse sound events-and the relatively brief, difference-focused output captions. This deviation from AC-style descriptions leads to a mismatch with the pretraining objective, resulting in catastrophic forgetting during finetuning. To mitigate this issue, we propose Audio Commonality Captioning (ACC), a comparably challenging but gentler alternative that encourages the model to capture the shared semantics across audio clips rather than emphasizing their detailed differences. Experimental results demonstrate that ACC not only effectively enhances audio-text understanding on primary captioning benchmarks but also better preserves general capabilities across diverse speech and music-related downstream tasks, such as vocal sound classification (VSC), speech emotion recognition (SER), musical instrument classification (MIC), and music genre classification (MGC), compared to ADC. These findings validate that ACC contributes to more robust cross-modal understanding and achieves a better balance between generalization and task-specific performance in the context of MLLMs.