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Main Authors: Milling, Manuel, Triantafyllopoulos, Andreas, Gebhard, Alexander, Rampp, Simon, Schuller, Björn W.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25476
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author Milling, Manuel
Triantafyllopoulos, Andreas
Gebhard, Alexander
Rampp, Simon
Schuller, Björn W.
author_facet Milling, Manuel
Triantafyllopoulos, Andreas
Gebhard, Alexander
Rampp, Simon
Schuller, Björn W.
contents Transfer learning is a crucial concept within deep learning that allows artificial neural networks to benefit from a large pre-training data basis when confronted with a task of limited data. Despite its ubiquitous use and clear benefits, there are still many open questions regarding the inner workings of transfer learning and, in particular, regarding the understanding of when and how well it works. To that extent, we perform a rigorous study focusing on audio-to-audio transfer learning, in which we pre-train various model states on (ontology-based) subsets of AudioSet and fine-tune them on three computer audition tasks, namely acoustic scene recognition, bird activity recognition, and speech command recognition. We report that increasing the number of samples and classes in the pre-training data both have a positive impact on transfer learning. This is, however, generally surpassed by similarity between pre-training and the downstream task, which can lead the model to learn comparable features.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Class Ontology and Data Scale Affect Audio Transfer Learning
Milling, Manuel
Triantafyllopoulos, Andreas
Gebhard, Alexander
Rampp, Simon
Schuller, Björn W.
Machine Learning
Transfer learning is a crucial concept within deep learning that allows artificial neural networks to benefit from a large pre-training data basis when confronted with a task of limited data. Despite its ubiquitous use and clear benefits, there are still many open questions regarding the inner workings of transfer learning and, in particular, regarding the understanding of when and how well it works. To that extent, we perform a rigorous study focusing on audio-to-audio transfer learning, in which we pre-train various model states on (ontology-based) subsets of AudioSet and fine-tune them on three computer audition tasks, namely acoustic scene recognition, bird activity recognition, and speech command recognition. We report that increasing the number of samples and classes in the pre-training data both have a positive impact on transfer learning. This is, however, generally surpassed by similarity between pre-training and the downstream task, which can lead the model to learn comparable features.
title How Class Ontology and Data Scale Affect Audio Transfer Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25476