CAF-Score: Calibrating CLAP with LALMs for Reference-free Audio Captioning Evaluation
While Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have advanced audio captioning, robust evaluation remains difficult. Reference-based metrics are expensive and often fail to assess acoustic fidelity, while Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP)-based approaches frequently overlook syntactic errors and fine-grained details. We propose CAF-Score, a reference-free metric that calibrates CLAP's coarse-grained semantic alignment with the fine-grained comprehension and syntactic awareness of LALMs. By combining contrastive audio-text embeddings with LALM reasoning, CAF-Score effectively detects syntactic inconsistencies and subtle hallucinations. Experiments on the BRACE benchmark demonstrate t...
| Authors | Insung Lee, Taeyoung Jeong, Haejun Yoo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 20 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 March 2026 |
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