| --- |
| title: CARD Audio Captioning |
| colorFrom: indigo |
| colorTo: purple |
| sdk: static |
| app_file: index.html |
| pinned: false |
| license: apache-2.0 |
| short_description: Encoder-free audio captioning demo (CARD, IEEE SLT 2026) |
| thumbnail: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KarthikKolluriKB/CARD/main/assets/logo/card-social-preview.png |
| models: |
| - KarthikKB1998/CARD-Qwen3-4B-AudioCaps |
| --- |
| |
| # CARD audio captioning demo |
|
|
| Interactive demo of **"CARD: Cross-component Audio Representation Distillation for Encoder-Free |
| Audio Captioning"** (IEEE SLT 2026). |
|
|
| Pick a sample clip, listen to it, and reveal the caption written by |
| [`KarthikKB1998/CARD-Qwen3-4B-AudioCaps`](https://huggingface.co/KarthikKB1998/CARD-Qwen3-4B-AudioCaps) |
| next to the human reference captions from the test set. |
|
|
| This is a static page. The captions were generated beforehand by the released model with the |
| paper's decoding settings (beam search, 4 beams, at most 40 new tokens). Beam search is |
| deterministic, so they are the captions the model produces live for these clips. To caption your |
| own audio, run the model in the |
| [Colab notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/KarthikKolluriKB/CARD/blob/main/notebooks/CARD_demo.ipynb). |
|
|
| CARD has no audio encoder at inference. A 13.2 M-parameter projector turns the log-Mel spectrogram |
| into audio tokens, which a Qwen3-4B language model with merged LoRA adapters reads to write the |
| caption. During training a frozen CLAP-HTSAT teacher was distilled into the model by component, |
| its early stages into the projector and its later stages into the language model. |
|
|
| - Code: https://github.com/KarthikKolluriKB/CARD |
| - Each sample clip keeps its original source and license, shown with its caption. |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @inproceedings{kolluri2026card, |
| title = {{CARD}: Cross-component Audio Representation Distillation for Encoder-Free Audio Captioning}, |
| author = {Kolluri, Ganesh Pavan Kartikeya Bharadwaj and Zhang, Yuchen and Kampouridis, Michael and Shekhar, Ravi}, |
| booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT)}, |
| year = {2026} |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
