The TMU System for the XACLE Challenge: Training Large Audio Language Models with CLAP Pseudo-Labels

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a submission to the x-to-audio alignment (XACLE) challenge. The goal is to predict semantic alignment of a given general audio and text pair. The proposed system is based on a large audio LLM (LALM) architecture. We employ a three-stage training pipeline: automated audio captioning pretraining, pretraining with CLAP pseudo-labels, and fine-tuning on the XACLE dataset. Our experiments show that pretraining with CLAP pseudo-labels is the primary performance driver. On the XACLE test set, our system reaches an SRCC of 0.632, significantly outperforming the baseline system (0.334) and securing third place in the challenge team ranking. Code and models can be found at https://github.com/shiotalab-tmu/tmu-xacle2026