Papers for

sound monitoring teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Looped transformer improves audio recognition with fewer resources

LAST: Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer

Abstract: Increasing depth of transformer models improves recognition, but it comes at a substantial cost. Each additional layer requires more parameters, which makes the process computationally inefficient. We ask whether additional processing can focus on integrating features already computed. Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer (LAST) first processes all tokens, then reuses the same blocks to refine only the class token over fixed audio features, thereby making later passes inexpensive. On AudioSet, ten-pass LAST achieves 0.345 mean average precision, exceeding a twelve-layer sequential transformer by 2.1% relative with 49.4% fewer parameters, 42% fewer multiply-accumulate operations, and 9.8% higher measured throughput. Across separately trained models, increasing the pass count from two to ten improves accuracy while adding only 1.2% computation. Further evaluations show improved robustness to temporal masking and various other auditory augmentations, with better generalization on classification tasks with music, environmental, and event sounds.

Thu 1 OctSoundMachine Learning
The gist
Deeper transformer models can understand audio better but need a lot of computing power and memory. The authors created a method called Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer (LAST) that repeatedly refines only a small part of the model's output, making later steps cheaper to run. This approach improves audio recognition accuracy while using fewer parameters and computations. It also makes models more robust to sound disruptions and works well across different sound types like music and environmental noises.
Open → 2610.01926v1