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arXiv · 2606.27965

Grammar-Guided Hierarchical Parsing for Long-form Audio Activity Recognition

Abstract

Long-form audio exhibits an inherent hierarchy: fine-grained events form sub-activities, which in turn constitute higher-level activities. Prior work often models these levels separately, leading to cross-level inconsistencies and requiring supervision at multiple levels. We formulate the problem as hierarchical parsing from event-level evidence: given detected event segments with class posteriors, we infer an order-consistent Act-Sub-Event parse tree. We propose Hierarchical Activity Grammar, encoding hierarchical composition and temporal-order constraints, and perform grammar-guided decoding that combines event evidence with a grammar prior. This yields a temporally grounded parse tree from which sub-activity segmentation and activity classification are derived, without requiring sub-activity or activity labels for training. Experiments on the long-form MultiAct audio dataset demonstrate improved temporal-order consistency (Edit score) and produces interpretable hierarchies.

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BibTeXRIS

Peng Zhang, Qingyu Luo, Philip J. B. Jackson, Wenwu Wang. 2026-06-26. Grammar-Guided Hierarchical Parsing for Long-form Audio Activity Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27965

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