Language Models as Semantic Teachers: Post-Training Alignment for Medical Audio Understanding

arXiv:2512.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pre-trained audio models excel at detecting acoustic patterns in auscultation sounds but often fail to grasp their clinical significance, limiting their use and performance in diagnostic tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce AcuLa (Audio-Clinical Understanding via Language Alignment), a lightweight post-training framework that instills semantic understanding into any audio encoder by aligning it with a medical language model, which acts