AFT: An Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning Method for Environmental Sound Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chen, Xinyi, Chen, Xi, Weng, Zhenyu, Xiao, Yang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Chen, Xinyi
Chen, Xi
Weng, Zhenyu
Xiao, Yang
author_facet Chen, Xinyi
Chen, Xi
Weng, Zhenyu
Xiao, Yang
contents As sounds carry rich information, environmental sound classification (ESC) is crucial for numerous applications such as rare wild animals detection. However, our world constantly changes, asking ESC models to adapt to new sounds periodically. The major challenge here is catastrophic forgetting, where models lose the ability to recognize old sounds when learning new ones. Many methods address this using replay-based continual learning. This could be impractical in scenarios such as data privacy concerns. Exemplar-free methods are commonly used but can distort old features, leading to worse performance. To overcome such limitations, we propose an Acoustic Feature Transformation (AFT) technique that aligns the temporal features of old classes to the new space, including a selectively compressed feature space. AFT mitigates the forgetting of old knowledge without retaining past data. We conducted experiments on two datasets, showing consistent improvements over baseline models with accuracy gains of 3.7\% to 3.9\%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AFT: An Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning Method for Environmental Sound Classification
Chen, Xinyi
Chen, Xi
Weng, Zhenyu
Xiao, Yang
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
As sounds carry rich information, environmental sound classification (ESC) is crucial for numerous applications such as rare wild animals detection. However, our world constantly changes, asking ESC models to adapt to new sounds periodically. The major challenge here is catastrophic forgetting, where models lose the ability to recognize old sounds when learning new ones. Many methods address this using replay-based continual learning. This could be impractical in scenarios such as data privacy concerns. Exemplar-free methods are commonly used but can distort old features, leading to worse performance. To overcome such limitations, we propose an Acoustic Feature Transformation (AFT) technique that aligns the temporal features of old classes to the new space, including a selectively compressed feature space. AFT mitigates the forgetting of old knowledge without retaining past data. We conducted experiments on two datasets, showing consistent improvements over baseline models with accuracy gains of 3.7\% to 3.9\%.
title AFT: An Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning Method for Environmental Sound Classification
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15523