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arXiv · 2303.07626

CAT: Causal Audio Transformer for Audio Classification

Abstract

The attention-based Transformers have been increasingly applied to audio classification because of their global receptive field and ability to handle long-term dependency. However, the existing frameworks which are mainly extended from the Vision Transformers are not perfectly compatible with audio signals. In this paper, we introduce a Causal Audio Transformer (CAT) consisting of a Multi-Resolution Multi-Feature (MRMF) feature extraction with an acoustic attention block for more optimized audio modeling. In addition, we propose a causal module that alleviates over-fitting, helps with knowledge transfer, and improves interpretability. CAT obtains higher or comparable state-of-the-art classification performance on ESC50, AudioSet and UrbanSound8K datasets, and can be easily generalized to other Transformer-based models.

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Xiaoyu Liu, Hanlin Lu, Jianbo Yuan, Xinyu Li. 2023-03-14. CAT: Causal Audio Transformer for Audio Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07626

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