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Record W4415902235 · doi:10.1016/j.mlwa.2025.100785

Multi-task learning for audio scene source counting and analysis

2025· article· en· W4415902235 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueMachine Learning with Applications · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicMusic and Audio Processing
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersToronto Metropolitan University
KeywordsTask (project management)LimitingAudio signal processingMulti-sourceAudio analyzerTask analysisRange (aeronautics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Audio source counting is a fundamental task of audio scene analysis related to other audio tasks such as speaker diarization and sound event detection. It is also a relatively unexplored audio task that presents a complex challenge. In particular, source counting performance is poor when the source count range is large, limiting its potential applications. This paper presents a novel approach to improve upon audio source counting through multi-task learning. We present a first of its kind empirical study on the hierarchical nature of audio source counting, introducing the coarse source counting task and a hierarchical multi-task learning framework, in order to better understand and investigate the audio source counting task through several case study scenarios. We perform multi-task learning with a ResNet architecture and demonstrate improvements to audio source counting accuracy by up to a 6% increase from the previous best result on the SARdBScene dataset. We also perform multi-task learning of audio source counting and acoustic scene classification as a step forward for robust audio scene analysis. These experimental results show improvements of up to 6% in source counting accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in high source count scenarios. Our findings highlight that multi-task learning not only enhances accuracy, but also improves efficiency by replacing multiple task-specific models with a single robust network.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.767
Threshold uncertainty score0.830

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.249 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it