universal-audio-annotation-pipeline

Universal Audio Annotation Pipeline — self-contained model mirror#

This repository is a complete, self-contained mirror of the LAION Universal Audio Annotation Pipeline: all model weights for every stage plus all the code needed to run it. If any of the upstream model repositories ever disappears, cloning this single repo gives you everything required to reproduce the pipeline end-to-end.

• 💻 Code (GitHub): https://github.com/LAION-AI/univeral-audio-annotation-pipeline
• 🌐 Live example predictions: https://laion-ai.github.io/univeral-audio-annotation-pipeline/predictions/ (also bundled here under predictions/)

What it does#

Given any audio file (a movie scene, a podcast, a field recording…), the pipeline produces a single structured JSON annotation of everything audible, second by second across the whole clip:

• Speech — transcription, speaker diarization (who speaks when), language, accent, speaking rate, age, gender, voice timbre, and expressive captions for the speaker's emotion and speaking style (e.g. "clearly intense anger laced with wounded disappointment", "low conspiratorial whisper"); singing is flagged explicitly.
• Vocal bursts — laughs, gasps, sighs, screams, scoffs, etc., with emotion.
• Sound events — every non-speech sound and the musical/ambient background, with timestamps and loudness, covering the full timeline (silence is labelled too).

What it's good for#

Building rich audio datasets and captions for TTS / audio-LM training, content understanding, media indexing, accessibility, emotion & paralinguistic research, and soundscape analysis.

What it produces#

A JSON array of segments (speech, vocal_burst, sound_event, music) — see the output schema. A self-contained HTML report (base64 audio + annotations) can be generated for inspection; an example is in predictions/.

Architecture#

┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    INPUT: Audio File (any length)                      │
└───────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────┘
                                     │
        ┌──────────────────────────┴──────────────────┐
        ▼                                              ▼
  ┌──────────────┐                          ┌────────────────────┐
  │ VibeVoice    │                          │ Nemotron 3.5 ASR + │
  │ ASR          │                          │ Sortformer         │
  │ (diarization │                          │ (words + secondary │
  │  & timing    │                          │  diarization)      │
  │  authority)  │                          │                    │
  └──────┬───────┘                          └─────────┬──────────┘
         │   diarization / timing      words / what is said
         └──────────────┬──────────────────────┬───────┘
              ▼                        ▼
  ┌──────────────────────┐  ┌──────────────────────────────┐
  │ Whisper experts (x3) │  │ Specialist sound-event prepass│
  │ emotion · timbre ·   │  │ • SFX LoRA (MOSS-8B-Instruct  │
  │ speaking-style        │  │   + laion sfx-lora r=128)     │
  │ (per utterance)      │  │ • Vocal-burst locator @0.7    │
  └──────────┬───────────┘  │   + sound-effect captioner    │
             │              └───────────────┬──────────────┘
             └───────────────┬──────────────┘
                             ▼
        ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
        │   Gemma-4-12B — TEXT-ONLY fusion (no audio)   │
        │  (+ pyannote overlap + DiCoW per-speaker ASR) │
        │  Nemotron words on VibeVoice timeline         │
        │  DETAILED sound-event + dedicated music caps  │
        │  legacy: MOSS-Audio-8B (audio, --fusion moss) │
        └───────────────────────┬──────────────────────┘
                                │  + deterministic gap-fill
                                ▼     (non-speech background only)
        ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
        │   OUTPUT: Structured JSON (covers full clip)  │
        │   [speech · vocal_burst · sound_event · music]│
        └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Default configuration (Gemma-12B + DiCoW): Nemotron 3.5 words + VibeVoice/Sortformer diarization + pyannote overlap detection + DiCoW overlap-aware per-speaker ASR, fused by a text-only Gemma-4-12B LLM (no audio in the final step). Highest-Reward pipeline on SoundScape-Bench (0.253, rank 3 of all systems, ~Gemini 3.5 Flash). It trades precision for recall (hallucination ~43% vs the audio MOSS config's 27%); the legacy audio MOSS-Audio-8B annotator stays available via --fusion moss. 🎧 Audio demo (20 samples vs ground truth) · 📊 Full model comparison

What is mirrored here#

models/ — all weights#

Default (Gemma-12B + DiCoW) models marked ⭐:

code/ — everything needed to run#

predictions/ — an example report (open predictions/index.html)#

How to run inference#

Full setup and run instructions: docs/default_pipeline.md.

The three ASR packages pin incompatible transformers versions, so each ASR stage runs in its own virtual-env; the Whisper experts, SFX LoRA, vocal-burst pre-pass and MOSS annotator share a base env. The helper script builds all of them:

# from code/universal-audio-annotation-pipeline/default_pipeline
bash setup_environments.sh ./envs                 # 4 venvs + clones of the sources
export UAAP_MOSS_SRC="$(pwd)/envs/MOSS-Audio"     # (or code/MOSS-Audio from this mirror)
huggingface-cli login                             # only needed if pulling the gated LoRA upstream

bash run_all.sh --audio /path/to/clips --workdir ./uaap_work --envs ./envs
#   --no-sfx          skip the SFX LoRA stage

To run entirely offline from this mirror, point each stage at the local models/<name> folder instead of the HF hub id, and set UAAP_MOSS_SRC=<this repo>/code/MOSS-Audio.

Outputs: <audio>_pred.json next to every input, all intermediates under uaap_work/<stem>/, and a self-contained uaap_work/report.html.

Key parameters#

Models load/unload sequentially → peak VRAM ≈ one large model (~18–23 GB) at a time.

Efficiency: with ≥2 GPUs the heavy stages (Gemma fusion ~30 s/clip, SFX, ASR…) are auto-sharded across GPUs over disjoint clips (--gpus 0,1), ≈N× faster with identical output. A quality-neutral lower-VRAM fuser is available via export GEMMA_FILE=gemma-4-12b-it-UD-Q6_K_XL.gguf.

Hardware#

~68 GB disk for the weights; 2× 24 GB GPUs recommended (VibeVoice-ASR is sharded across two, the rest fit on a single 24 GB GPU).

Licensing & attribution#

This is a mirror for resilience. Each mirrored model keeps the license of its original repository (linked in the table above) — please consult and comply with each. The pipeline code is Apache-2.0. Mirrored by LAION.