2024/07/22 by Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Triantafyllopoulos, Andreas, Iosif Tsangko +9
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Neural Networks and Applications #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.15672
openalex publication_date 2024/07/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly spearheading recent advances on a variety of tasks that fall under the purview of computer audition -- the use of machines to understand sounds. They feature several advantages over traditional pipelines: among others, the ability to consolidate multiple tasks in a single model, the option to leverage knowledge from other modalities, and the readily-available interaction with human users. Naturally, these promises have created substantial excitement in the audio community, and have led to a wave of early attempts to build new, general-purpose foundation models for audio. In the present contribution, we give an overview of computational audio analysis as it transitions from traditional pipelines towards auditory foundation models. Our work highlights the key operating principles that underpin those models, and showcases how they can accommodate multiple tasks that the audio community previously tackled separately.