A Multi-Task Learning Framework for Sound Event Detection using High-level Acoustic Characteristics of Sounds

Sound event detection (SED) entails identifying the type of sound and estimating its temporal boundaries from acoustic signals. These events are uniquely characterized by their spatio-temporal features, which are determined by the way they are produced. In this study, we leverage some distinctive high-level acoustic characteristics of various sound events to assist the SED model training, without requiring additional labeled data. Specifically, we use the DCASE Task 4 2022 dataset and categorize the 10 classes into four subcategories based on their high-level acoustic characteristics. We then introduce a novel multi-task learning framework that jointly trains the SED and high-level acoustic characteristics classification tasks, using shared layers and weighted loss. Our method significantly improves the performance of the SED system, achieving a 36.3% improvement in terms of the polyphonic sound event detection score compared to the baseline on the DCASE 2022 Task 4 validation set.

Leveraging Audio-Tagging Assisted Sound Event Detection using Weakified Strong Labels and Frequency Dynamic Convolutions

Jointly learning from a small labeled set and a larger unlabeled set is an active research topic under semi-supervised learning (SSL). In this paper, we propose a novel SSL method based on a two-stage framework for leveraging a large unlabeled in-domain set. Stage-1 of our proposed framework focuses on audio-tagging (AT), which assists the sound event detection (SED) system in Stage-2. The AT system is trained utilizing a strongly labeled set converted into weak predictions referred to as weakified set, a weakly labeled set, and an unlabeled set. This AT system then infers on the unlabeled set to generate reliable pseudo-weak labels, which are used with the strongly and weakly labeled set to train a frequency dynamic convolutional recurrent neural network-based SED system at Stage-2 in a supervised manner. Our system outperforms the baseline by 45.5% in terms of polyphonic sound detection score on the DESED real validation set.