acoupi: An Open-Source Python Framework for Deploying Bioacoustic AI Models on Edge Devices

1. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an essential tool for biodiversity monitoring. Traditional PAM systems require manual data offloading and impose substantial demands on storage and computing infrastructure. The combination of on-device AI-based processing and network connectivity enables local data analysis and transmission of only relevant information, greatly reducing storage needs. However, programming these devices for robust operation is challenging, requiring expertise in embedded systems and software engineering. Despite the increase in AI-based models for bioacoustics, their full potential remains unrealized without accessible tools to deploy them on custom hardware and tailor device behaviour to specific monitoring goals. 2. To address this challenge, we develop acoupi, an open-source Python framework that simplifies the creation and deployment of smart bioacoustic devices. acoupi integrates audio recording, AI-based data processing, data management, and real-time wireless messaging into a unified and configurable framework. By modularising key elements of the bioacoustic monitoring workflow, acoupi allows users to easily customise, extend, or select specific components to fit their unique monitoring needs. 3. We demonstrate the flexibility of acoupi by integrating two bioacoustic classifiers: BirdNET, for the classification of bird species, and BatDetect2, for the classification of UK bat species. We test the reliability of acoupi over a month-long deployment of two acoupi-powered devices in a UK urban park. 4. acoupi can be deployed on low-cost hardware such as the Raspberry Pi and can be customised for various applications. acoupi standardised framework and simplified tools facilitate the adoption of AI-powered PAM systems for researchers and conservationists. acoupi is on GitHub at https://github.com/acoupi/acoupi.

Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noise

The growing importance of massive datasets with the advent of deep learning makes robustness to label noise a critical property for classifiers to have. Sources of label noise include automatic labeling for large datasets, non-expert labeling, and label corruption by data poisoning adversaries. In the latter case, corruptions may be arbitrarily bad, even so bad that a classifier predicts the wrong labels with high confidence. To protect against such sources of noise, we leverage the fact that a small set of clean labels is often easy to procure. We demonstrate that robustness to label noise up to severe strengths can be achieved by using a set of trusted data with clean labels, and propose a loss correction that utilizes trusted examples in a data-efficient manner to mitigate the effects of label noise on deep neural network classifiers. Across vision and natural language processing tasks, we experiment with various label noises at several strengths, and show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods.