arXiv Machine Learning

CoarseSoundNet: Building a reliable model for ecological soundscape analysis

CoarseSoundNet is a deep learning framework designed to classify ecological soundscapes into biophony, geophony, and anthropophony under realistic passive acoustic monitoring conditions. The study systematically explores model architectures, training data composition, and evaluation strategies, finding that adding more domain‑similar data, a silence class, and post‑hoc calibration improves performance. An ecological case study shows that pre‑filtering recordings with CoarseSoundNet produces acoustic index trends similar to ground‑truth filtering, though the impact on avian alpha‑diversity relationships is modest.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Beyond task performance: Decoding bioacoustic embeddings with speech features

arXiv:2606. 14662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task.

By Ines Nolasco, Jules Cauzinille, Marius Miron, Gagan Narula, Milad Alizadeh, Emmanuel Fernandez, Matthieu Geist, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Olivier Pietquin, Emmanuel Chemla, Sara Keen
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

A Hierarchical Method for Environmental Sounds Recognition in Complex Acoustic Scenes

The paper introduces a lightweight hierarchical model for environmental sound recognition that combines a Frequency-Time Adaptive Network (FTANet) with a two-stage classification process. FTANet uses parallel asymmetric 1‑D convolutions and adaptive fusion attention to extract temporal and frequency‑band features, first classifying sounds into five coarse categories and then routing them to fine‑grained classifiers. The model achieves high accuracy on a self‑constructed dataset, UrbanSound8K, and real‑world field tests, demonstrating its effectiveness for urban noise monitoring.

By Zhouwen Li, Haijun Lin, Bowen Lv, Yupeng Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15

MetaPerch: Learning from metadata for bioacoustics foundation models

Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data. Recent work has shown that supervision alone can produce SotA species detection models when trained on this large-scale data -- however, there remains unutilized potential in the form of recording metadata readily available within these community-driven data hubs.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

BEANS-Next and ROOTS: Broadening Audio-Language Capabilities for Bioacoustics

The paper introduces BEANS-Next, a comprehensive benchmark covering acoustic perception, biological category recognition, scene understanding, and in-context learning in bioacoustics, and shows that current audio‑language models perform poorly outside the narrow label‑centric tasks traditionally evaluated. To address this gap, the authors present ROOTS, a large‑scale training dataset enriched with curated real‑world data, behavioral and acoustic metadata, and synthetic generation, which improves performance across all BEANS‑Next task groups. Both the benchmark and dataset are released as open‑source resources to accelerate research in bioacoustics and ethology.

By Christos Plachouras, David Robinson, Marius Miron, Gagan Narula, Paul Laisn\'e, Anthony L. T. Fine, Benno Weck, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Diane Kim, Laura Hay Mack, Maddie Cusimano, Sara Keen, Lukas Rauch, Benjamin Hoffman, Emmanuel Chemla, Emmanouil Benetos, Johan Pauwels, Milad Alizadeh, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Active Learning for Biodiversity Monitoring: From Label Efficiency to Reliable Ecological Inference

The paper discusses how active learning (AL) can alleviate the expert annotation bottleneck in biodiversity monitoring by selecting the most informative samples under a fixed budget. It highlights that while AL reduces labeling effort, its non-random sample selection complicates model validation, calibration, and ecological inference, issues often overlooked in current studies. The authors review existing AL research across acoustic and image data, identify gaps such as limited species coverage and lack of real-world deployments, and propose a tutorial framework and roadmap for developing AL methods that support efficient training, reliable validation, and trustworthy ecological conclusions.

By Ben McEwen, Shiqi Zhang, Dan Stowell