This repository contains the codebase for all experiments for the research project Self-Supervised Learning for Audio Inference.

Abstract:
This report presents Audio Barlow Twins, a novel self-supervised audio representation learning approach. Audio Barlow Twins adapts the Barlow Twins [Zbontar et al., 2021] objective from Computer Vision (CV) to the audio domain. The Barlow Twins objective encourages the empirical cross-correlation matrix between the embeddings of two distorted views of a data sample towards the identity matrix, thereby both enforcing invariance to the applied data augmentations as well as explicitly preventing representational collapse through decorrelation of the individual components of the embedding vectors (redundancy-reduction). Audio Barlow Twins utilises a combination of different data augmentations, all of which act directly on the audio data preprocessed as mel-spectrograms, and considers both convolutional and Transformer encoder architectures. We pre-train on the large-scale audio dataset AudioSet, and evaluate the quality of the learned representations on 18 tasks from the HEAR 2021 Challenge (https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03022) [Turian et al., 2021], achieving results on a par with the current state-of-the-art for instance discrimination self-supervised approaches to audio representation learning. The impact of the individual components of the learning framework are analysed through extensive ablation studies.

This work has been adapted to a paper Audio Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Audio Representation Learning [Anton et al., 2022] and has been accepted at ICASSP 2023.

The full written report can be found in the file ABT_full_report.pdf.