Multi-grained Correspondence Learning of Audio-language Models for Few-shot Audio Recognition

Large-scale pre-trained audio-language models excel in general multi-modal representation, facilitating their adaptation to downstream audio recognition tasks in a data-efficient manner. However, existing few-shot audio recognition methods based on audio-language models primarily focus on learning coarse-grained correlations, which are not sufficient to capture the intricate matching patterns between the multi-level information of audio and the diverse characteristics of category concepts. To address this gap, we propose multi-grained correspondence learning for bootstrapping audio-language models to improve audio recognition with few training samples. This approach leverages generative models to enrich multi-modal representation learning, mining the multi-level information of audio alongside the diverse characteristics of category concepts. Multi-grained matching patterns are then established through multi-grained key-value cache and multi-grained cross-modal contrast, enhancing the alignment between audio and category concepts. Additionally, we incorporate optimal transport to tackle temporal misalignment and semantic intersection issues in fine-grained correspondence learning, enabling flexible fine-grained matching. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmark datasets for few-shot audio recognition, with comprehensive ablation experiments validating its effectiveness.