Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning of Audio Spectrogram Transformers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods have emerged as a solid alternative to the standard full fine-tuning approach. They only train a few extra parameters for each downstream task, without sacrificing performance and dispensing with the issue of storing a copy of the pre-trained model for each task. For audio classification tasks, the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) model shows impressive results. However, surprisingly, how to efficiently adapt it to several downstream tasks has not been tackled before. In this paper, we bridge this gap and present a detailed investigation of common PETL methods for the adaptation of the AST model to audio/speech tasks. Furthermore, we propose a new adapter design that exploits the convolution module of the Conformer model, leading to superior performance over the standard PETL approaches and surpassing or achieving performance parity with full fine-tuning by updating only 0.29% of the parameters. Finally, we provide ablation studies revealing that our proposed adapter: 1) proves to be effective in few-shot efficient transfer learning, 2) attains optimal results regardless of the amount of the allocated parameters, and 3) can be applied to other pre-trained models. Our code is available at https:/github.com/umbertocappellazzo/PETL_AST.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".