arXiv subjects

Giacomo Ferroni

Publications and source records attributed to Giacomo Ferroni.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Sound Event Detection with Boundary-Aware Optimization and Inference

Temporal detection problems appear in many fields including time-series estimation, activity recognition and sound event detection (SED). In this work, we propose a new approach to temporal event modeling by explicitly modeling event onsets and offsets, and by introducing boundary-aware optimization and inference strategies that substantially enhance temporal event detection. The presented methodology incorporates new temporal modeling layers - Recurrent Event Detection (RED) and Event Proposal Network (EPN) - which, together with tailored loss functions, enable more effective and precise temporal event detection. We evaluate the proposed method in the SED domain using a subset of the temporally-strongly annotated portion of AudioSet. Experimental results show that our approach not only outperforms traditional frame-wise SED models with state-of-the-art post-processing, but also removes the need for post-processing hyperparameter tuning, and scales to achieve new state-of-the-art performance across all AudioSet Strong classes.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

More Than A Shortcut: A Hyperbolic Approach To Early-Exit Networks

Deploying accurate event detection on resource-constrained devices is challenged by the trade-off between performance and computational cost. While Early-Exit (EE) networks offer a solution through adaptive computation, they often fail to enforce a coherent hierarchical structure, limiting the reliability of their early predictions. To address this, we propose Hyperbolic Early-Exit networks (HypEE), a novel framework that learns EE representations in the hyperbolic space. Our core contribution is a hierarchical training objective with a novel entailment loss, which enforces a partial-ordering constraint to ensure that deeper network layers geometrically refine the representations of shallower ones. Experiments on multiple audio event detection tasks and backbone architectures show that HypEE significantly outperforms standard Euclidean EE baselines, especially at the earliest, most computationally-critical exits. The learned geometry also provides a principled measure of uncertainty, enabling a novel triggering mechanism that makes the overall system both more efficient and more accurate than a conventional EE and standard backbone models without early-exits.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2020

Improving Sound Event Detection Metrics: Insights from DCASE 2020

The ranking of sound event detection (SED) systems may be biased by assumptions inherent to evaluation criteria and to the choice of an operating point. This paper compares conventional event-based and segment-based criteria against the Polyphonic Sound Detection Score (PSDS)'s intersection-based criterion, over a selection of systems from DCASE 2020 Challenge Task 4. It shows that, by relying on collars , the conventional event-based criterion introduces different strictness levels depending on the length of the sound events, and that the segment-based criterion may lack precision and be application dependent. Alternatively, PSDS's intersection-based criterion overcomes the dependency of the evaluation on sound event duration and provides robustness to labelling subjectivity, by allowing valid detections of interrupted events. Furthermore, PSDS enhances the comparison of SED systems by measuring sound event modelling performance independently from the systems' operating points.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

A Framework for the Robust Evaluation of Sound Event Detection

This work defines a new framework for performance evaluation of polyphonic sound event detection (SED) systems, which overcomes the limitations of the conventional collar-based event decisions, event F-scores and event error rates. The proposed framework introduces a definition of event detection that is more robust against labelling subjectivity. It also resorts to polyphonic receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves to deliver more global insight into system performance than F1-scores, and proposes a reduction of these curves into a single polyphonic sound detection score (PSDS), which allows system comparison independently from operating points (OPs). The presented method also delivers better insight into data biases and classification stability across sound classes. Furthermore, it can be tuned to varying applications in order to match a variety of user experience requirements. The benefits of the proposed approach are demonstrated by re-evaluating the baseline and two of the top-performing systems from DCASE 2019 Task 4.

eess.AS↗