Sound Event Detection

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Overview

Sound event detection (SED) aims to recognize acoustic events—such as speech, machinery, animal calls, or household sounds—and often locate them in time, sometimes also estimating their direction. Common approaches include CNNs, recurrent networks, and transformers trained with frame-level labels, alongside weakly supervised, semi-supervised, and self-supervised methods that reduce reliance on detailed annotation. Benchmarks such as DESED, AudioSet, and URBAN-SED support comparisons, while real-world bioacoustic, industrial, and domestic recordings test performance under overlapping sounds and changing environments. Key challenges are reliable temporal boundaries, limited labels and domain shift, and balancing accuracy with open-vocabulary capability and low-cost deployment.

Latest papers

CardsList

61 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. MixCards: Evaluating Structured Descriptions of Multi-Source Sound Scenes

    Oct 28, 2026Sripathi Sridhar, Yujin Kim, Giovana Morais +6Audio-Language Model EvaluationAudio Understanding

    New Jersey Institute of Technology · New York University · Adobe Research +1

  2. Dolphin broadband transient vocalization detection in impulsive ambient noise

    Oct 26, 2026Hari Vishnu, Jin Xinhui, Mandar Chitre +2Underwater AcousticsBioacoustics

    Acoustic Research Laboratory, Tropical Marine Science Institute, National University of Singapore. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore.

  3. Do bioacoustic foundation models hear through the noise ? SNR and generalization in underwater detection

    Oct 20, 2026Lucie Jean-Labadye, Nicolas Farrugia, Axel Marmoret +2BioacousticsNoise Robustness

    Sorbonne Universit´e, Institut ∂’Alembert, UMR CNRS 7190, F-75005, Paris, France · ENSTA, Lab-STICC, UMR CNRS 6285, F-29806, Brest, France · IMT Atlantique, Lab-STICC, UMR CNRS 6285, F-29238 Brest, France

  4. Sleep Sound Event Detection Powered by Learnable Multi-Resolution Adaptive Line Enhancer

    Oct 11, 2026Chanwoo Park, Chanwoo KimSound Event Detection

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, South Korea

  5. 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

  6. QC-MI-OVSEL: Benchmarking Query-Conditioned Multi-Instance Open-Vocabulary Sound Event Localization

    Oct 9, 2026Yongqiang Chen, Peiwei Chang, Yuelan Cheng +2Audio UnderstandingSpatial Audio

    Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, UK

  7. MiDashengLM-Spatial: Unifying General Audio Understanding and Spatial Awareness

    Oct 8, 2026Jinbo Hu, Hang Su, Lichun Fan +10Audio-Language ModelsAudio Understanding

    Xiaomi Inc., China

  8. CARES: A Controlled Synthetic Benchmark of Speaker Reactions to Sound

    Oct 7, 2026Marcel Gibier, Thomas Thebaud, Olivier Boëffard +1Audio UnderstandingAudio Captioning

    Inria, Paris, France · AMIAD, France

  9. Logbook: Extremely Long-form Audio Event Understanding

    Oct 5, 2026Kwanghee Choi, Suwon Shon, Dmitriy Serdyuk +7Audio-Language Model EvaluationAudio Understanding

    UT Austin, USA · Meta Reality Labs, USA

  10. Evaluating Inference-time Algorithms for Semantic Sound Scene Segmentation

    Oct 2, 2026Sripathi Sridhar, Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama +2Sound Event DetectionInference-Time Optimization

    New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark NJ, USA · Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA, USA

  11. Bad: Taming the Bioacoustic Data Deluge with a Bat Activity Detector

    Sep 29, 2026Stefano Ciapponi, Santiago Martinez Balvanera, Andrea Cesaretti +2Sound Event DetectionBioacoustics

    Fondazione Bruno Kessler · University of Trento · University College London

  12. SincDPNet: Interpretable Raw-Waveform Bathroom Activity Recognition for Assistive Living

    Sep 28, 2026Debolina Chowdhury, Suman Samui, Sujoy SahaTiny MLSound Event Detection

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, Durgapur 713209, West Bengal, India · Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, Durgapur 713209, West Bengal, India

  13. 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

  14. SAIL: Spatial Audio Intelligence with Large Language Models via Disentangled Acoustic-Spatial Encoding and Dual-Stream Q-Former

    Sep 28, 2026Zhengding Luo, Jinyang Wu, Haozhe Ma +3Audio ReasoningDirection-of-Arrival Estimation

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Singapore Management University · Tencent Hy Frontier Lab, Singapore +2

  15. SAID: Semantic Acoustic Imaging Detector for Sound Event Localization and Detection

    Sep 25, 2026Runbang Wang, Zining Liang, Yin Cao +1Sound Event DetectionSpatial Audio

    Nanjing University, China · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering (SHIAE), Hong Kong SAR, China +1

  16. Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Acoustic Pedestrian Detection

    Sep 24, 2026Yonghyun Kim, Chaeyeon Han, Sancho Gatungay +2Cross-Modal Knowledge DistillationSelective Knowledge Distillation

    Music Informatics Group, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA · College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

  17. REVE: Efficient Hallucination Correction for Large Audio-Language Models via Reused Encoder States

    Sep 22, 2026Hongjin Song, Jiasheng Kuang, Xinyu Yang +4Audio-Language Model Hallucination DetectionSound Event Detection

    Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhuhai, Guangdong, China

  18. 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

  19. EquiSELD: Efficient training of equivariant sound event localization and detection networks

    Sep 19, 2026Goksenin Yuksel, Marcel van Gerven, Kiki van der HeijdenSound Event DetectionEquivariant Neural Networks

    Dept. of Machine Learning and Neural Computing, Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands · Mortimer B. Zuckerman Institute, Columbia University, New York, USA

  20. Bearings: Self-Supervised Soundfield Embeddings from First-Order Ambisonics

    Sep 19, 2026Goksenin Yuksel, Marcel van Gerven, Kiki van der HeijdenSpatial AudioAudio Representation Learning

    Dept. of Machine Learning and Neural Computing, Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands · Mortimer B. Zuckerman Institute, Columbia University, New York, USA

  21. MAST: Label-Efficient, Robust, and Generalizable Sound Detection for Biodiversity Monitoring via Masked Audio Pretraining and Self-Training

    Sep 14, 2026Tianyi Xu, Daniel Pimentel-Alarcón, Zuzana Buřivalová +1Self-TrainingSound Event Detection

    University of Wisconsin–Madison

  22. Augmenting Large Audio-Language Models with Frame-Level Grounding for Fine-Grained Temporal Perception

    Sep 14, 2026Yanfeng Shi, Yan Song, Junhui Li +4Audio UnderstandingAudio-Language Models

    National Engineering Research Center of Speech and Language Information Processing, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · ICT Cluster, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore

  23. Predictive audio representations for early detection and tracking of hidden dynamic objects

    Sep 11, 2026Katerina Vinciguerra, Moritz Brandes, Danilo Hollosi +1Autonomous Driving PerceptionDirection-of-Arrival Estimation

    Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Parma, Parma, Italy · Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT, Oldenburg, Germany

  24. NVV-Locator: From Transcript Tags to Acoustic Boundaries for Fine-Grained Nonverbal Vocalization Grounding

    Sep 9, 2026Yuang Cao, Bingshen Mu, Zhennan Lin +7Audio UnderstandingSound Event Detection

    School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China · State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China

  25. Large-scale bioacoustic detection using semantic segmentation: a deep learning framework applied to fin whale calls in ocean-bottom seismometer recordings

    Sep 8, 2026Jocelyn Japnanto, Alex A. Saoulis, Miriam Romagosa +5BioacousticsPassive Acoustic Monitoring

    Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom · Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, London, United Kingdom · Instituto de Investigação em Ciências do Mar (OKEANOS), Universidade dos Açores, Horta, Portugal +4

  26. Efficient Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Killer Whales Using a Two-Stage Detection and Ecotype Classification Cascade

    Sep 1, 2026Daniela Ruiz, Manuel Castellote, Zhongqi Miao +5Sound Event DetectionBioacoustics

    Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab, Redmond, Washington, USA · Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia

  27. Smartphone Audio Based Distress Detection

    Aug 4, 2026Anil Sharma, Sarthak Ahuja, Mayank Gautam +1Sound Event DetectionAudio Classification

    IIIT-Delhi, India

  28. An End-to-End Workflow for Fin Whale Song Detection, Note Characterization, and Localization with Distributed Acoustic Sensing

    Aug 3, 2026Dídac Diego-Tortosa, Miriam Romagosa, Arantza Ugalde +4Distributed Acoustic SensingSound Event Detection

    Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), Barcelona · Institut de Física Corpuscular (IFIC), Centre Mixte Universitat de València (UV-CSIC), Paterna

  29. Ultra-Compact CNN Architectures for Tropical Bird Audio Detection on Microcontrollers

    Jul 22, 2026Muhammad Mun'im Ahmad Zabidi, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Norisma IdrisConvolutional Neural NetworksWildlife Monitoring

    Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

  30. RealDESED: A Real-World Domestic Sound Event Detection Benchmark

    Jul 18, 2026Florian Schmid, Paul Primus, Alexander Fichtinger +3Sound Event Detection

    Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria · LIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Linz, Austria