Query-Conditioned Liquid Temporal Grounding for Long-Form Audio

Overview & Synopsis

Long-form temporal audio grounding (TAG) is challenging because target events often occupy only a small portion of a recording, while queries may impose multiple semantic constraints over a large temporal search space. We propose a query-conditioned liquid temporal grounding framework that injects query semantics through FiLM before a closed-form continuous-time (CfC) network models long-range temporal dependencies. Multiple query-relevant candidates are generated, from which a frozen large audio-language model selects the most compatible one for lightweight local boundary refinement. The pretrained backbone remains frozen, with only lightweight grounding modules optimized. Experiments on the English TAG subset of LAT-Bench show consistent improvements across MOSS-Audio and Qwen3-Omni, while ablations confirm the complementary roles of FiLM and CfC.