{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/comparing-self-supervised-learning-models-pre","title":"Comparing Self-Supervised Learning Models Pre-Trained on Human Speech and Animal Vocalizations for Bioacoustics Processing","arxiv_id":"2501.05987","date":"2025-01-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Eklavya Sarkar","Mathew Magimai. -Doss"],"abstract":"Self-supervised learning (SSL) foundation models have emerged as powerful, domain-agnostic, general-purpose feature extractors applicable to a wide range of tasks. Such models pre-trained on human speech have demonstrated high transferability for bioacoustic processing. This paper investigates (i) whether SSL models pre-trained directly on animal vocalizations offer a significant advantage over those pre-trained on speech, and (ii) whether fine-tuning speech-pretrained models on automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks can enhance bioacoustic classification. We conduct a comparative analysis using three diverse bioacoustic datasets and two different bioacoustic tasks. Results indicate that pre-training on bioacoustic data provides only marginal improvements over speech-pretrained models, with comparable performance in most scenarios. Fine-tuning on ASR tasks yields mixed outcomes, suggesting that the general-purpose representations learned during SSL pre-training are already well-suited for bioacoustic tasks. These findings highlight the robustness of speech-pretrained SSL models for bioacoustics and imply that extensive fine-tuning may not be necessary for optimal performance.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05987v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05987v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"comparing-self-supervised-learning-models-pre","repo_url":"https://github.com/idiap/ssl-human-animal","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition-2","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2501.05987","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}