README.md

---
license: apache-2.0
pipeline_tag: audio-text-to-text
library_name: glap_model
---

<div align="center">
    <h1>
    GLAP (Generalized Language Audio Pretraining)
    </h1>
    <p>
    Official PyTorch code for <b>GLAP</b> <br>
    <b><em>Generalized Language Audio Pretraining</em></b>
    </p>
    </p>
    <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11350"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/arXiv-2506.11350-b31b1b" alt="version"></a>
    <a href="https://github.com/xiaomi/glap"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Platform-linux-lightgrey" alt="version"></a>
    <a href="https://www.python.org"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Python-3.10+-orange" alt="version"></a>
    <a href="https://pytorch.org"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/PyTorch-2.0+-brightgreen" alt="python"></a>
    <a href="https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/License-Apache%202.0-blue.svg" alt="mit"></a>
    <img src="https://img.shields.io/pypi/dm/glap_model" alt="PyPI Downloads">

</div>




# GLAP (Generalized Language Audio Pretraining)


<img src="capabilities.png" alt="GLAP capabiltiies" style="height: 600px;">


## Features


* *First* all-in-one solution for general audio-text retrieval. 
* Multilingual (8 + Languages) Speech, Music and Sound retrieval. 
* Music and Sound retrieval performance in English matches previous baselines, while also **supporting** Languages like Japanese, German, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch and more.


## Usage


```bash
pip install glap_model
```


### Scoring audio-text pairs

We provide a simple commandline tool:

```bash
score_glap audio_input_file text1;text2;text3
```

Or in Python:

```python
import torch
from glap_model import glap_inference

audio = torch.randn(1, 160000).tanh() # 10s of heavy noise

glap_model = glap_inference()

score = glap_model.score_forward(audio, text=["the sound of noise","a car is driving","a person is speaking"])
print(score)
```



### Recommended Prompts

| Task   | Prompt                                  |
|--------|-----------------------------------------|
| Speech | {label}                                 |
| Music  | The music in the style of {label}.      |
| Sound  | The sound of {label} can be heard.      |


### Batched scoring


```python
import torch
from glap_model import glap_inference

glap_model = glap_inference()
audio = torch.randn(1, 64000).tanh()
prefix = "The sound of"
labels = [ f"{prefix} {label}" for label in ("Cat","Dog","Water","Noise")]
text_embeds = glap_model.encode_text(labels)
audio_embeds = glap_model.encode_audio(audio)
scores = glap_model.score(audio_embeds, text_embeds)
for label_name, score in zip(labels, scores):
  print(label_name,score)


```

## Development


### UV (Recommended)

```bash
git clone https://github.com/xiaomi-research/GLAP
cd GLAP
uv venv --python 3.10
source activate .venv/bin/activate
uv sync

#python3 -m pip install .
# Additionally, sndfile is needed
# conda install -c conda-forge libsndfile==1.0.31
```

### Pip

```bash
git clone https://github.com/xiaomi-research/GLAP
cd GLAP
python3 -m pip install .
# Additionally, sndfile is needed
# conda install -c conda-forge libsndfile==1.0.31
# Or if you have root, use your package manager
```


### Prepare data


Data needs to be in `tar/tar.gz` format:

```
   # tar -tf a.tar
908-31957-0013.flac
908-31957-0013.json
2961-960-0013.flac
2961-960-0013.json
```


Each `.json` should have one of three fields `caption`, `captions` or `text`.
Data preparation can be done using the `wavlist_to_tar` script, which is provided in the `dasheng` dependency.
Further information how to process data can be seen [here](https://github.com/XiaoMi/dasheng?tab=readme-ov-file#3-training).

### Training


For reference, we provide our original training config for GLAP `configs/train/multilingual_dasheng_asr_sound2_sigmoidloss_balanced.yaml`.


```bash
accelerate launch --mixed-precision='fp16' run.py train configs/train/multilingual_dasheng_asr_sound2_sigmoidloss_balanced.yaml
```


### Zeroshot eval (one sample)


```bash
# There ; is a separator for different text keys
python3 run.py zeroshot pretrained_checkpoint/glap_checkpoint.pt PATH_TO_WAV_FLAC_MP3_SAMPLE.wav "The sound of a horse;Car;Mama;The sound of music;somebody is speaking;The sound of ein Pferd;一只马;Music is played;音乐的声音;Musik ist zu hoeren";Zero;One;Two;Three"
```

### Retrieval scoring

```bash
# Should be run on a single GPU
accelerate launch --mixed-precision='fp16' run.py evaluate PATH_TO_CHECKPOINT
```



### Notes on DDP

Using uneven training datasets without `resample=True` is not recommended


## Translating data into a target language

For our experiments we used SONAR to translate audio captions into seven target languages. This can be reproduced using our code:


```bash
python3 run.py translate_sonar data/WavCaps/freesound/freesound_train_sample_0000* --output_path data/translations/WavCaps/freesound/
```

DDP is also supported:

```bash
accelerate launch run.py translate_sonar  data/WavCaps/freesound/freesound_train_sample_0000* --output_path data/translations/WavCaps/freesound/
```

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{2506.11350,
Author = {Heinrich Dinkel and Zhiyong Yan and Tianzi Wang and Yongqing Wang and Xingwei Sun and Yadong Niu and Jizhong Liu and Gang Li and Junbo Zhang and Jian Luan},
Title = {GLAP: General contrastive audio-text pretraining across domains and languages},
Year = {2025},
Eprint = {arXiv:2506.11350},
}
```