2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDAUD-13.5
Paper Title UNSUPERVISED CONTRASTIVE LEARNING OF SOUND EVENT REPRESENTATIONS
Authors Eduardo Fonseca, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain; Diego Ortego, Kevin McGuinness, Noel E. O'Connor, Dublin City University, Ireland; Xavier Serra, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
SessionAUD-13: Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 2: Weak supervision
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Poster
Topic Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing: [AUD-CLAS] Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract Self-supervised representation learning can mitigate the limitations in recognition tasks with few manually labeled data but abundant unlabeled data---a common scenario in sound event research. In this work, we explore unsupervised contrastive learning as a way to learn sound event representations. To this end, we propose to use the pretext task of contrasting differently augmented views of sound events. The views are computed primarily via mixing of training examples with unrelated backgrounds, followed by other data augmentations. We analyze the main components of our method via ablation experiments. We evaluate the learned representations using linear evaluation, and in two in-domain downstream sound event classification tasks, namely, using limited manually labeled data, and using noisy labeled data. Our results suggest that unsupervised contrastive pre-training can mitigate the impact of data scarcity and increase robustness against noisy labels.