DeePAQ: A Perceptual Audio Quality Metric Based On Foundational Models and Weakly Supervised Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Jiang, Guanxin, Brendel, Andreas, Delgado, Pablo M., Herre, Jürgen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Jiang, Guanxin
Brendel, Andreas
Delgado, Pablo M.
Herre, Jürgen
author_facet Jiang, Guanxin
Brendel, Andreas
Delgado, Pablo M.
Herre, Jürgen
contents This paper presents the Deep learning-based Perceptual Audio Quality metric (DeePAQ) for evaluating general audio quality. Our approach leverages metric learning together with the music foundation model MERT, guided by surrogate labels, to construct an embedding space that captures distortion intensity in general audio. To the best of our knowledge, DeePAQ is the first in the general audio quality domain to leverage weakly supervised labels and metric learning for fine-tuning a music foundation model with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a direction not yet explored by other state-of-the-art methods. We benchmark the proposed model against state-of-the-art objective audio quality metrics across listening tests spanning audio coding and source separation. Results show that our method surpasses existing metrics in detecting coding artifacts and generalizes well to unseen distortions such as source separation, highlighting its robustness and versatility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12326
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeePAQ: A Perceptual Audio Quality Metric Based On Foundational Models and Weakly Supervised Learning
Jiang, Guanxin
Brendel, Andreas
Delgado, Pablo M.
Herre, Jürgen
Audio and Speech Processing
This paper presents the Deep learning-based Perceptual Audio Quality metric (DeePAQ) for evaluating general audio quality. Our approach leverages metric learning together with the music foundation model MERT, guided by surrogate labels, to construct an embedding space that captures distortion intensity in general audio. To the best of our knowledge, DeePAQ is the first in the general audio quality domain to leverage weakly supervised labels and metric learning for fine-tuning a music foundation model with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a direction not yet explored by other state-of-the-art methods. We benchmark the proposed model against state-of-the-art objective audio quality metrics across listening tests spanning audio coding and source separation. Results show that our method surpasses existing metrics in detecting coding artifacts and generalizes well to unseen distortions such as source separation, highlighting its robustness and versatility.
title DeePAQ: A Perceptual Audio Quality Metric Based On Foundational Models and Weakly Supervised Learning
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12326