Abstract
Training-free anomalous sound detection (ASD) based on pre-trained audio embedding models has recently garnered significant attention, as it enables the detection of anomalous sounds using only normal reference data while offering improved robustness under domain shifts. However, existing embedding-based approaches almost exclusively rely on temporal mean pooling, while alternative pooling strategies have so far only been explored for spectrogram-based representations. Consequently, the role of temporal pooling in training-free ASD with pre-trained embeddings remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we present a systematic evaluation of temporal pooling strategies across multiple state-of-the-art audio embedding models. We propose relative deviation pooling (RDP), an adaptive pooling method that assigns larger weights to embeddings with stronger temporal deviations, and introduce a hybrid pooling strategy that combines RDP with generalized mean (GeM) pooling. Experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods consistently outperform mean pooling and achieve state-of-the-art performance for training-free ASD, including results that surpass previously reported trained systems and ensembles on the DCASE2025 ASD dataset.
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Jun 17, 2026cs.SD
Training-free anomalous sound detection (ASD) scores a test clip against a memory bank of normal embeddings from a frozen pretrained audio encoder. Recent work attributes domain-shift robustness mainly to how frame-level features are pooled over time; the scoring backend applied on top of the pooled embedding has received far less systematic attention. Using a single frozen BEATs encoder on the DCASE 2023 Task 2 development set (all seven machine types), we cross four classical backends -- nearest-neighbor cosine distance, Mahalanobis distance, locally density-normalized kNN, and PCA-subspace reconstruction residual -- with three temporal poolings (mean, GeM, max). Switching the backend moves target-domain AUC by 13.8 points on average (up to 53.8), whereas switching the pooling moves it by only 3.2 points: in this training-free regime, the backend, not the pooling, dominates domain-shift robustness. No backend wins everywhere, but the machine-dependent pattern reproduces on the DCASE 2025 development data (fan, bearing). Exploiting this, we propose a label-free score fusion that z-normalizes each backend with its training-bank self-scores and takes the minimum; it reaches a harmonic-mean target AUC of 63.3% versus 64.4% for the per-machine oracle, surpassing every fixed single backend while preserving source-domain accuracy. We also report a negative result: selecting a backend by source-domain pseudo-validation with proxy outliers fails, because all backends saturate on the proxy task.
Jingwen Zhou, Mingzhe Wang
Jul 14, 2026cs.SD
Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) aims to determine whether faults have occurred by monitoring sounds. Existing methods detect a limited range of anomalies, exhibit poor generalization, or train a separate model for each machine. Diffusion models possess strong generalization and can generate specific data with condition guidance. We propose a unified diffusion model only with a small module. The audio is first transformed into log-Mel spectrograms. The lightweight module embeds machine IDs into condition embeddings, guiding the model to reconstruct data for specific machines. Then diffusion model reconstructs data with condition, using Gaussian Mixture Models to fit the distributions of reconstruction errors. Our unified model could monitor multiple machine types and learn more fundamental feature spaces with cross-domain learning. Experiments on DCASE2022 Challenge Task 2 show that our model achieves 3.44% AUC and 2.52% pAUC improvements over baseline, validating its effectiveness.
Pengxiang Gao, Yu Qiu, Yanzhi Song
Jul 5, 2026cs.SD
First-shot anomalous sound detection in DCASE Challenge Task 2 must flag anomalies of unseen machine types with a single threshold, without knowing whether a test clip comes from the data-rich source domain (990 normal training clips) or the data-scarce target domain (10). Two organizer-reported problems remain open: source- and target-domain AUC are negatively correlated across systems, and development-set performance does not predict evaluation-set performance. We address both with a training-free post-hoc layer over frozen audio embeddings: (i) per-domain quantile calibration shrunk toward a pooled map by a prior strength m, tracing a source/target balance frontier, and (ii) a label-free cross-validated domain-balance criterion that ranks candidate configurations from training normals only, paired with a coarse development-labeled viability veto. On DCASE 2025, the criterion rank-predicts the official evaluation score across a 45-configuration grid (Spearman rho = +0.91; family-block bootstrap 95% CI [+0.83, +0.95]) while development score is uninformative (+0.06). Criterion-based selection raises the evaluation score from 55.83 to 59.34 (jackknife CI [2.2, 4.8]) and, on an extended grid, to 61.05 -- retrospectively fourth of 35 teams. Replicating on DCASE 2023 and 2024 bounds the claim: development score is uninformative in all three years and degenerate configurations recur (vetoed every time), but under family-clustered uncertainty the criterion's predictive evidence survives only in 2025; in both replication years a fixed full-equalization default matches or beats criterion-based selection. A DCASE 2026 forward test is frozen before the 2026 evaluation ground truth is released; all headline numbers are reproduced by the official evaluator.
Grach Mkrtchian