English

Audio Mamba: Bidirectional State Space Model for Audio Representation Learning

Sound 2024-06-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

Transformers have rapidly become the preferred choice for audio classification, surpassing methods based on CNNs. However, Audio Spectrogram Transformers (ASTs) exhibit quadratic scaling due to self-attention. The removal of this quadratic self-attention cost presents an appealing direction. Recently, state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have demonstrated potential in language and vision tasks in this regard. In this study, we explore whether reliance on self-attention is necessary for audio classification tasks. By introducing Audio Mamba (AuM), the first self-attention-free, purely SSM-based model for audio classification, we aim to address this question. We evaluate AuM on various audio datasets - comprising six different benchmarks - where it achieves comparable or better performance compared to well-established AST model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.03344,
  title  = {Audio Mamba: Bidirectional State Space Model for Audio Representation Learning},
  author = {Mehmet Hamza Erol and Arda Senocak and Jiu Feng and Joon Son Chung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.03344},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Code is available at https://github.com/mhamzaerol/Audio-Mamba-AuM

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:54:40.175Z