Phylogenetic signal in marine mammal and bird vocalizations captured by audio foundation models: the limited benefit of domain-specific pretraining
Do learned audio embeddings encode structure that nobody told them to encode? We probe four large pretrained audio models (AST, CLAP, BEATs-bio and BirdNET) with a downstream task none of them saw during training: recovering phylogenetic distance from species vocalizations. If the geometry of the embedding space tracks the tree of life, the representation is picking up something deeper than the labels the model was optimized for. We run Mantel tests across two independent radiations. In 32 marine mammal species (1,754 recordings from the Watkins Marine Mammal Sound Database) the foundation models recover strong phylogenetic signal within the 26 cetaceans (CLAP r=0.82, BEATs-bio r=0.82, AS...
| Authors | Víctor Rincón Yepes |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 24 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 July 2026 |
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