Audio Classification

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Overview

Audio classification studies how to assign sounds to labels, from spoken words and music genres to bird calls, machine faults, and respiratory conditions. Systems commonly use spectrograms, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, or raw waveforms with convolutional networks, transformers, and pretrained or self-supervised audio encoders; limited-label settings also use transfer learning, few-shot methods, and audio-language models. Benchmarks such as AudioSet, ESC-50, UrbanSound8K, and ICBHI test different tasks, but strong benchmark scores may not carry over across recording devices, locations, speakers, or species. A central challenge is building reliable models from scarce or weak labels while avoiding data leakage and shortcuts, and keeping models efficient enough for clinical and on-device use.

Latest papers

CardsList

147 papers18 papers in the last four weeks, up 6% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Geometric Consistency Based Label-Free Validation for Checkpoint Selection in Audio Active Learning

    Oct 26, 2026Shiqi Zhang, Tuomas VirtanenActive LearningAudio Classification

    Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

  2. A Hierarchical Method for Environmental Sounds Recognition in Complex Acoustic Scenes

    Oct 26, 2026Zhouwen Li, Haijun Lin, Bowen Lv +1Audio ClassificationHierarchical Classification

    Hunan Normal University School of Engineering and Design Changsha, China

  3. STFT Frontend Mismatch in Pretrained Audio Spectrogram Transformers: Analysis and Adaptation

    Oct 25, 2026Julia Wilkins, Wei-Ching Lin, Abinaya Kumar +2Audio ClassificationTransformer

    New York University, USA · Bosch Research, USA

  4. MarineSet: Large-Scale Underwater Acoustic Data Curation and evaluation

    Oct 21, 2026Hilde I. Hummel, Sandjai Bhulai, Rob D. van der Mei +1Underwater AcousticsTraining Data Curation

    Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

  5. MiCLA: Mixture-to-Constituent Latent Alignment for Polyphonic Audio Representation Learning

    Oct 20, 2026Kohei Yamamoto, Kosuke OkusaAudio Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Pre-Training

    Research & Development Center, Technology Division, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd., Saitama, Japan. · Department of Data Science for Business Innovation, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan.

  6. Multilingual Voicemail and Answering Machine Detection via Pretrained Audio Embeddings and Gradient Boosting Machines

    Oct 19, 2026Kemal Altwlkany, Muamer ParicAudio ClassificationAudio Understanding

    Infobip · Faculty of Science, University of Sarajevo

  7. Hierarchical Interpretable Multitask Audio Representation Learning: An Analysis of Event-Scene Relationships through the Information Bottleneck

    Oct 15, 2026Claudia Montero-Ramírez, Alba Martínez-Serrano, Carmen Peláez-MorenoAudio ClassificationMulti-Task Learning

  8. FAM-gate: field-aware metadata attention with prior-constrained vector gating for audio classification

    Oct 10, 2026Xiangyu Jing, Hongqing Liu, Liming ShiGated Multimodal FusionAudio Classification

    School of Communications and Information Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China

  9. Speech event detector: Timestamped detection of non-verbal vocalizations and background sounds for rich speech transcription

    Oct 9, 2026Ayush Kumar Bar, Promila GhoshSound Event DetectionAudio Classification

  10. Revisiting Accent Classification with DistilHuBERT: Speaker-Disjoint Evaluation and Cross-Corpus Generalization

    Oct 9, 2026Xu He, Homayoon BeigiCross-Dataset GeneralizationAudio Classification

    Department of Electrical Engineering Columbia University New York, NY, USA · Mechanical Engineering Dept. and Electrical Engineering Dept. Columbia University, NYC, NY, USA · Recognition Technologies, Inc. South Salem, NY, USA

  11. Lightweight Systems for Spatial Semantic Segmentation of Sound Scenes

    Oct 8, 2026Mayank Mishra, Paul Magron, Romain SerizelSpatial AudioAudio Source Separation

    Universit´e de Lorraine, CNRS, Inria, LORIA, F-54000 Nancy, France

  12. A Strength-Monotonic Law for Domain Alignment in Frozen-Embedding Bioacoustic Classification

    Oct 7, 2026Yucheng Gong, Rui Zhou, Binbin Zeng +2Cross-Domain GeneralizationAudio Classification

    Department of Software Engineering, School of Software, Chongqing Finance and Economics College Chongqing Key Laboratory of Data Mining and Integrated Application for Ecological Environment

  13. AccentCL: Robust Accent Classification with Incremental Expansion

    Oct 5, 2026Mu-Ruei Tseng, Waris Quamer, Ghady Nasrallah +1Class-Incremental LearningAudio Classification

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77840, USA

  14. Neural Representations, Natural Connections: What Transfers From Human Speech Foundation Models to Animal Vocalizations?

    Oct 5, 2026Tomás Arias-Vergara, Christopher Hauer, Héloïse Brotier +3Audio Representation LearningSpeech Foundation Models

    Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany · Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Media and Computer Science, OTH Amberg-Weiden, Germany · Faculty of Life Science, The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar Ilan University, Israel

  15. Do Speech Representations Preserve Regional Accent Across Read and Spontaneous Speech?

    Oct 5, 2026Paula A. Perez-Toro, Tomas Arias-Vergara, Annette Schwarz +4Audio Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

    Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany. · Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi), Bamberg, Germany. · Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany.

  16. Learning from imperfect teachers for low-resource acoustic generalization

    Oct 4, 2026Shuanglin Li, Ruxiao Qian, Jian Liu +3Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge DistillationAudio Classification

  17. Aggregate accuracy conceals concentrated temporal vulnerability in a spiking speech classifier

    Oct 2, 2026İsmail Can DikmenAdversarial RobustnessSpiking Neural Networks

    Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, İstinye University, Sarıyer, İstanbul, 34396, Türkiye

  18. LAST: Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer

    Oct 1, 2026Haider Al-Tahan, Sean O'Brien, Anastasia Razdaibiedina +1Audio UnderstandingRecurrent Transformers

    Georgia Institute of Technology · University of California San Diego · Google DeepMind

  19. Rate-Agnostic Bioacoustics: Heterogeneous Multi-Taxa Classification with Continuous Filterbanks and Fourier Neural Operators

    Sep 29, 2026Stefano Ciapponi, Francesco Ardan Dal Rı, Nicola Conci +1BioacousticsAudio Classification

    University of Trento · Fondazione Bruno Kessler

  20. OpenWhistle: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Dataset and Benchmark of Bottlenose Dolphin Vocalizations

    Sep 28, 2026Faadil Mustun, Chiara Semenzin, Roberto Dessi +7Sound Event DetectionBioacoustics

    Institut de Biologie de l’École normale supérieure, CNRS, INSERM, Université PSL, Paris, France · Earth Species Project, France · Not Diamond, San Francisco, USA +4

  21. Uncovering shortcut learning in audio classifiers by discovering recurring concepts in temporal explanations

    Sep 27, 2026Cecilia Bolaños, Luciana Ferrer, Magdalena FuentesConcept-Based ExplanationsClassification

    Departamento de Computación, FCEyN, UBA · ICC, CONICET-UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina · Music and Audio Research Lab, New York University, USA +1

  22. Towards Deployable Underwater Vessel Classification

    Sep 24, 2026Abishek Soti, Thura Pyae Sone, Naqib Ibnul +4Passive Acoustic MonitoringLightweight CNNs

    ICNS, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia

  23. Physiologically Informed Digital Auscultation for Pneumonia Detection in Long-term Care Residents

    Sep 23, 2026Nicholas Rasmussen, Oleg Zaslavsky, Zih-Ling Wang +5Audio ClassificationRespiratory Sound Classification

    Biobehavioral Nursing & Health Informatics, School of Nursing, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific St, Seattle, WA, USA. · School of Nursing, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific St, Seattle, WA, USA. · Electrical Engineering, University of Washington Bothell, 17827 113th Ave NE, Bothell, WA, USA. +2

  24. Long-Tail Rebalancing for Non-Verbal Vocalization-Aware ASR: A Track 1 System for the NVVSpeech Challenge

    Sep 20, 2026Shangyue Jia, Jingru Ma, Yangzhuo Li +9Long-Tail LearningAutomatic Speech Recognition

    School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University · Jilin University · Beijing Institute of Technology +3

  25. Misrecognition or Abstraction? Rethinking Outputs of Sound Event Recognition

    Sep 20, 2026Naoya Tomida, Yuki Okamoto, Keisuke ImotoSound Event DetectionAudio Classification

    Kyoto University, Japan · The University of Tokyo, Japan

  26. The Unbearable Weight: Scaling Models and Methods for UAV Audio Classification

    Sep 15, 2026Andrew P. Berg, Qian Zhang, Mia Y. WangLightweight CNNsAudio Classification

    Department of Computer Science, College of Charleston, Charleston SC, USA. · Department of Engineering, College of Charleston, Charleston SC, USA.

  27. Sample-Conditioned Representation Selection for Audio Few-Shot Learning

    Sep 15, 2026Fengrui Liu, Ningxin Shen, Yi Li +3Few-Shot Audio ClassificationAudio Representation Learning

    National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Computer Science, Nanjing University · School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University +1

  28. Listening for Airway Stenosis: A Foundation Model-Based Method for Rapid and Accessible Detection

    Sep 14, 2026Jean Groeninger, Zihao Zhao, Juliana de Castilhos +2Speech Foundation ModelsAudio Classification

    Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, University Hospital Aachen

  29. Parameter isolation with domain-specific experts for incremental audio classification

    Sep 13, 2026Jongyeon Park, Do-Hyeon Lim, Sang-won Park +4Domain-Incremental LearningAudio Classification

    Dept. of AI Convergence, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) · Dept. of EECS, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) · AunionAI Co., Ltd., Gwangju, Korea +1

  30. UniqueShip: Mitigating Data Leakage in Acoustic Ship Classification Benchmark Datasets

    Sep 12, 2026Connor Hashemi, Trevor Stout, Anthony Hoogs +1Audio ClassificationData Leakage

    Kitware, Inc., 1712 Route 9, Suite 300, Clifton Park, NY 12065, USA