Exploring Performance-Complexity Trade-Offs in Sound Event Detection Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Morocutti, Tobias, Schmid, Florian, Greif, Jonathan, Foscarin, Francesco, Widmer, Gerhard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Morocutti, Tobias
Schmid, Florian
Greif, Jonathan
Foscarin, Francesco
Widmer, Gerhard
author_facet Morocutti, Tobias
Schmid, Florian
Greif, Jonathan
Foscarin, Francesco
Widmer, Gerhard
contents We target the problem of developing new low-complexity networks for the sound event detection task. Our goal is to meticulously analyze the performance-complexity trade-off, aiming to be competitive with the large state-of-the-art models, at a fraction of the computational requirements. We find that low-complexity convolutional models previously proposed for audio tagging can be effectively adapted for event detection (which requires frame-wise prediction) by adjusting convolutional strides, removing the global pooling, and, importantly, adding a sequence model before the (now frame-wise) classification heads. Systematic experiments reveal that the best choice for the sequence model type depends on which complexity metric is most important for the given application. We also investigate the impact of enhanced training strategies such as knowledge distillation. In the end, we show that combined with an optimized training strategy, we can reach event detection performance comparable to state-of-the-art transformers while requiring only around 5% of the parameters. We release all our pre-trained models and the code for reproducing this work to support future research in low-complexity sound event detection at https://github.com/theMoro/EfficientSED.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11373
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Performance-Complexity Trade-Offs in Sound Event Detection Models
Morocutti, Tobias
Schmid, Florian
Greif, Jonathan
Foscarin, Francesco
Widmer, Gerhard
Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
We target the problem of developing new low-complexity networks for the sound event detection task. Our goal is to meticulously analyze the performance-complexity trade-off, aiming to be competitive with the large state-of-the-art models, at a fraction of the computational requirements. We find that low-complexity convolutional models previously proposed for audio tagging can be effectively adapted for event detection (which requires frame-wise prediction) by adjusting convolutional strides, removing the global pooling, and, importantly, adding a sequence model before the (now frame-wise) classification heads. Systematic experiments reveal that the best choice for the sequence model type depends on which complexity metric is most important for the given application. We also investigate the impact of enhanced training strategies such as knowledge distillation. In the end, we show that combined with an optimized training strategy, we can reach event detection performance comparable to state-of-the-art transformers while requiring only around 5% of the parameters. We release all our pre-trained models and the code for reproducing this work to support future research in low-complexity sound event detection at https://github.com/theMoro/EfficientSED.
title Exploring Performance-Complexity Trade-Offs in Sound Event Detection Models
topic Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11373