Audio generation systems now create very realistic soundscapes that can enhance media production, but also pose potential risks. Several studies have examined deepfakes in speech or singing voice. However, environmental sounds have different characteristics, which may make methods for detecting speech and singing deepfakes less effective for real-world sounds. In addition, existing datasets for environmental sound deepfake detection are limited in scale and audio types. To address this gap, we introduce EnvSDD, the first large-scale curated dataset designed for this task, consisting of 45.25 hours of real and 316.74 hours of fake audio. The test set includes diverse conditions to evaluate the generalizability, such as unseen generation models and unseen datasets. We also propose an audio deepfake detection system, based on a pre-trained audio foundation model. Results on EnvSDD show that our proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art systems from speech and singing domains.

Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) aims to design a generalizable method that can be used to detect anomalies when only normal sounds are given. In this paper, Anomalous Sound Detection based on Diffusion Models (ASD-Diffusion) is proposed for ASD in real-world factories. In our pipeline, the anomalies in acoustic features are reconstructed from their noisy corrupted features into their approximate normal pattern. Secondly, a post-processing anomalies filter algorithm is proposed to detect anomalies that exhibit significant deviation from the original input after reconstruction. Furthermore, denoising diffusion implicit model is introduced to accelerate the inference speed by a longer sampling interval of the denoising process. The proposed method is innovative in the application of diffusion models as a new scheme. Experimental results on the development set of DCASE 2023 challenge task 2 outperform the baseline by 7.75%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) has gained significant interest through the application of various Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in industrial settings. Though possessing great potential, ASD systems can hardly be readily deployed in real production sites due to the generalization problem, which is primarily caused by the difficulty of data collection and the complexity of environmental factors. This paper introduces a robust ASD model that leverages audio pre-trained models. Specifically, we fine-tune these models using machine operation data, employing SpecAug as a data augmentation strategy. Additionally, we investigate the impact of utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) tuning instead of full fine-tuning to address the problem of limited data for fine-tuning. Our experiments on the DCASE2023 Task 2 dataset establish a new benchmark of 77.75% on the evaluation set, with a significant improvement of 6.48% compared with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including top-tier traditional convolutional networks and speech pre-trained models, which demonstrates the effectiveness of audio pre-trained models with LoRA tuning. Ablation studies are also conducted to showcase the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

Machine anomalous sound detection (ASD) has emerged as one of the most promising applications in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) due to its unprecedented efficacy in mitigating risks of malfunctions and promoting production efficiency. Previous works mainly investigated the machine ASD task under centralized settings. However, developing the ASD system under decentralized settings is crucial in practice, since the machine data are dispersed in various factories and the data should not be explicitly shared due to privacy concerns. To enable these factories to cooperatively develop a scalable ASD model while preserving their privacy, we propose a novel framework named CoopASD, where each factory trains an ASD model on its local dataset, and a central server aggregates these local models periodically. We employ a pre-trained model as the backbone of the ASD model to improve its robustness and develop specialized techniques to stabilize the model under a completely non-iid and domain shift setting. Compared with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) models trained in centralized settings, CoopASD showcases competitive results with negligible degradation of 0.08%. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of CoopASD.

Automated audio captioning (AAC) is an audio-to-text task to describe audio contents in natural language. Recently, the advancements in large language models (LLMs), with improvements in training approaches for audio encoders, have opened up possibilities for improving AAC. Thus, we explore enhancing AAC from three aspects: 1) a pre-trained audio encoder via consistent ensemble distillation (CED) is used to improve the effectivity of acoustic tokens, with a querying transformer (Q-Former) bridging the modality gap to LLM and compress acoustic tokens; 2) we investigate the advantages of using a Llama 2 with 7B parameters as the decoder; 3) another pre-trained LLM corrects text errors caused by insufficient training data and annotation ambiguities. Both the audio encoder and text decoder are optimized by low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Experiments show that each of these enhancements is effective. Our method obtains a 33.0 SPIDEr-FL score, outperforming the winner of DCASE 2023 Task 6A.

Sound event detection (SED) is essential for recognizing specific sounds and their temporal locations within acoustic signals. This becomes challenging particularly for on-device applications, where computational resources are limited. To address this issue, we introduce a novel framework referred to as dual knowledge distillation for developing efficient SED systems in this work. Our proposed dual knowledge distillation commences with temporal-averaging knowledge distillation (TAKD), utilizing a mean student model derived from the temporal averaging of the student model's parameters. This allows the student model to indirectly learn from a pre-trained teacher model, ensuring a stable knowledge distillation. Subsequently, we introduce embedding-enhanced feature distillation (EEFD), which involves incorporating an embedding distillation layer within the student model to bolster contextual learning. On DCASE 2023 Task 4A public evaluation dataset, our proposed SED system with dual knowledge distillation having merely one-third of the baseline model's parameters, demonstrates superior performance in terms of PSDS1 and PSDS2. This highlights the importance of proposed dual knowledge distillation for compact SED systems, which can be ideal for edge devices.

This paper introduces FALL-E, a foley synthesis system and its training/inference strategies. The FALL-E model employs a cascaded approach comprising low-resolution spectrogram generation, spectrogram super-resolution, and a vocoder. We trained every sound-related model from scratch using our extensive datasets, and utilized a pre-trained language model. We conditioned the model with dataset-specific texts, enabling it to learn sound quality and recording environment based on text input. Moreover, we leveraged external language models to improve text descriptions of our datasets and performed prompt engineering for quality, coherence, and diversity. FALL-E was evaluated by an objective measure as well as listening tests in the DCASE 2023 challenge Task 7. The submission achieved the second place on average, while achieving the best score for diversity, second place for audio quality, and third place for class fitness.

The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is a biological pest control technique based on the release into the environment of sterile males of the insect species whose population is to be controlled. The entire SIT process involves mass-rearing within a biofactory, sorting of the specimens by sex, sterilization, and subsequent release of the sterile males into the environment. The reason for avoiding the release of female specimens is because, unlike males, females bite, with the subsequent risk of disease transmission. In the case of Aedes mosquito biofactories for SIT, the key point of the whole process is sex separation. This process is nowadays performed by a combination of mechanical devices and AI-based vision systems. However, there is still a possibility of false negatives, so a last stage of verification is necessary before releasing them into the environment. It is known that the sound produced by the flapping of adult male mosquitoes is different from that produced by females, so this feature can be used to detect the presence of females in containers prior to environmental release. This paper presents a study for the detection of females in Aedes mosquito release vessels for SIT programs. The containers used consist of PVC a tubular design of 8.8cm diameter and 12.5cm height. The containers were placed in an experimental setup that allowed the recording of the sound of mosquito flight inside of them. Each container was filled with 250 specimens considering the cases of (i) only male mosquitoes, (ii) only female mosquitoes, and (iii) 75% males and 25% females. Case (i) was used for training and testing, whereas cases (ii) and (iii) were used only for testing. Two algorithms were implemented for the detection of female mosquitoes: an unsupervised outlier detection algorithm (iForest) and a one-class SVM trained with male-only recordings.

Few-shot bioacoustic event detection consists in detecting sound events of specified types, in varying soundscapes, while having access to only a few examples of the class of interest. This task ran as part of the DCASE challenge for the third time this year with an evaluation set expanded to include new animal species, and a new rule: ensemble models were no longer allowed. The 2023 few shot task received submissions from 6 different teams with F-scores reaching as high as 63% on the evaluation set. Here we describe the task, focusing on describing the elements that differed from previous years. We also take a look back at past editions to describe how the task has evolved. Not only have the F-score results steadily improved (40% to 60% to 63%), but the type of systems proposed have also become more complex. Sound event detection systems are no longer simple variations of the baselines provided: multiple few-shot learning methodologies are still strong contenders for the task.

In this technical report, a low-complexity deep learning system for acoustic scene classification (ASC) is presented. The proposed system comprises two main phases: (Phase I) Training a teacher network; and (Phase II) training a student network using distilled knowledge from the teacher. In the first phase, the teacher, which presents a large footprint model, is trained. After training the teacher, the embeddings, which are the feature map of the second last layer of the teacher, are extracted. In the second phase, the student network, which presents a low complexity model, is trained with the embeddings extracted from the teacher. Our experiments conducted on DCASE 2023 Task 1 Development dataset have fulfilled the requirement of low-complexity and achieved the best classification accuracy of 57.4%, improving DCASE baseline by 14.5%.