English

Advancing Natural-Language Based Audio Retrieval with PaSST and Large Audio-Caption Data Sets

Audio and Speech Processing 2023-08-09 v1 Information Retrieval Machine Learning Sound

Abstract

This work presents a text-to-audio-retrieval system based on pre-trained text and spectrogram transformers. Our method projects recordings and textual descriptions into a shared audio-caption space in which related examples from different modalities are close. Through a systematic analysis, we examine how each component of the system influences retrieval performance. As a result, we identify two key components that play a crucial role in driving performance: the self-attention-based audio encoder for audio embedding and the utilization of additional human-generated and synthetic data sets during pre-training. We further experimented with augmenting ClothoV2 captions with available keywords to increase their variety; however, this only led to marginal improvements. Our system ranked first in the 2023's DCASE Challenge, and it outperforms the current state of the art on the ClothoV2 benchmark by 5.6 pp. mAP@10.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.04258,
  title  = {Advancing Natural-Language Based Audio Retrieval with PaSST and Large Audio-Caption Data Sets},
  author = {Paul Primus and Khaled Koutini and Gerhard Widmer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.04258},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

submitted to DCASE Workshop 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:50:51.660Z