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MAT-SED: A Masked Audio Transformer with Masked-Reconstruction Based Pre-training for Sound Event Detection

16 Aug 2024arXiv:2408.08673archive 2025-07-28

Pengfei Cai, Yan Song, Kang Li, Haoyu Song, Ian McLoughlin

Sound event detection (SED) methods that leverage a large pre-trained Transformer encoder network have shown promising performance in recent DCASE challenges. However, they still rely on an RNN-based context network to model temporal dependencies, largely due to the scarcity of labeled data. In this work, we propose a pure Transformer-based SED model with masked-reconstruction based pre-training, termed MAT-SED. Specifically, a Transformer with relative positional encoding is first designed as the context network, pre-trained by the masked-reconstruction task on all available target data in a self-supervised way. Both the encoder and the context network are jointly fine-tuned in a semi-supervised manner. Furthermore, a global-local feature fusion strategy is proposed to enhance the localization capability. Evaluation of MAT-SED on DCASE2023 task4 surpasses state-of-the-art performance, achieving 0.587/0.896 PSDS1/PSDS2 respectively.

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Code

cai525/transformer4sed officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Event DetectionSound Event Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sound Event Detection DESED MAT-SED PSDS1 0.587 #10 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Sound Event Detection DESED MAT-SED PSDS2 0.896 #10 of 13 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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