Unlocking Strong Supervision: A Data-Centric Study of General-Purpose Audio Pre-Training Methods
Current audio pre-training seeks to learn unified representations for broad audio understanding tasks, but it remains fragmented and is fundamentally bottlenecked by its reliance on weak, noisy, and scale-limited labels. Drawing lessons from vision's foundational pre-training blueprint, we argue that the audio field must first establish its own large-scale, strong supervision framework. We introduce a new data-centric pipeline that leverages a high-fidelity captioner to create SOTA-quality captions and the first Unified Tag System (UTS) that bridges speech, music, and environmental sounds. We then conduct a systematic comparative study of different pre-training objectives on these strong ...
| Authors | Xuanru Zhou, Yiwen Shao, Wei-Cheng Tseng et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 26 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 March 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.