arXiv subjects

R. Oguz Araz

Publications and source records attributed to R. Oguz Araz.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Training Music Sample Identification Models on Real Sample Pairs

Sample identification (SI) is the task of matching pairs of tracks, where one track is created by musically transforming an element of the other. In the absence of sample annotations at scale, the dominant training paradigm has depended on artificially creating sample pairs. Although a recently released dataset provides annotations of real sample pairs at scale, an effective training recipe is missing. In this work, we present SI Embeddings (SIE), an SI model that achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks, including a large-scale test set. We show that the previous state of the art trained on artificial pairs generalizes only partially to real pairs, and that its training data limits its performance. We also show that real pairs do not fully account for SIE's performance: its architecture and training recipe contribute substantially. We provide the first fully supervised training recipe for real-world SI, establishing a strong foundation for future research in the field.

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arXiv2026

Building a Dataset for Music Sample Identification

Sample identification (SI) is the task of matching an element of a musical work to its musically transformed versions used to create new works. The task has received little attention and lacks large-scale publicly available data. In this work, we mine sampling annotations from a music database and split them for training and evaluation. The resulting dataset is nearly three orders of magnitude larger than the existing SI benchmarks, with training, validation, and test sets of 114 k, 6 k, and 10 k tracks. We find that naively splitting the annotations places the same tracks in different sets. To avoid this, we construct a graph from the annotations and split it over connected components. We further find that a single mega-component contains half of the annotations, making component-wise splitting incompatible with balanced splits; we trim it, yielding a leakage-aware pipeline. We share the dataset for non-commercial scientific research purposes only and make the data-analysis and splitting code publicly available. We hope that our work fosters research on SI.

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arXiv2026

Unified Music Identification for Tracks and Versions

Given a music database, track identification (TI) retrieves the exact track matching an audio excerpt, whereas version identification (VI) retrieves its musical versions. Traditionally, the two tasks have been addressed separately. However, as every track is its own closest version, we investigate whether VI can subsume TI. This requires VI systems to be robust to both signal manipulation and audio degradation. We therefore propose a unified benchmark that evaluates accuracy and robustness on each task. Comparing seven existing models on this benchmark, we show that none of them are both accurate and robust on both tasks. We then train a baseline model targeting both tasks and show that a unified system is possible with 10 s TI queries. Lastly, we characterize the two retrieval constraints that limit our model's TI performance. We envision extending this unification to other music identification tasks.

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arXiv2026

Towards Robust Version Identification in the Wild: A Dataset, Benchmark, and Fine-Tuning Study

Existing datasets for musical version identification (VI) are primarily derived from curated metadata sources such as SecondHandSongs and Discogs, and are therefore dominated by professionally recorded tracks. This leads to a domain mismatch with real-world scenarios, where amateur and user-generated content is prevalent. To address this limitation, we introduce DiVers, a large-scale VI dataset comprising over 1.1 million musical versions, with train-validation-test splits compatible with established datasets such as Discogs-VI-YT, SHS100K, and Da-TACOS. In addition to standard version-level annotations, DiVers provides automatically assigned tags (e.g., instrumental, live) and segment-level predictions indicating the presence or absence of music. We evaluate the proposed dataset by training state-of-the-art VI systems. Our results show that models trained on DiVers achieve substantially improved robustness to acoustically diverse and noisy inputs, while maintaining a stable performance on cleaner, studio-quality benchmarks. We release the dataset metadata, code for its construction, and all experimental pipelines to support reproducibility.

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arXiv2025

OMAR-RQ: Open Music Audio Representation Model Trained with Multi-Feature Masked Token Prediction

Developing open-source foundation models is essential for advancing research in music audio understanding and ensuring access to powerful, multipurpose representations for music information retrieval. We present OMAR-RQ, a model trained with self-supervision via masked token classification methodologies using a large-scale dataset with over 330,000 hours of music audio. We experiment with different input features and quantization options, and achieve state-of-the-art performance in music tagging, pitch estimation, chord recognition, beat tracking, segmentation, and difficulty estimation among open self-supervised models. We open-source our training and evaluation pipelines and model weights, available at https://github.com/mtg/omar-rq.

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arXiv2025

Enhancing Neural Audio Fingerprint Robustness to Audio Degradation for Music Identification

Audio fingerprinting (AFP) allows the identification of unknown audio content by extracting compact representations, termed audio fingerprints, that are designed to remain robust against common audio degradations. Neural AFP methods often employ metric learning, where representation quality is influenced by the nature of the supervision and the utilized loss function. However, recent work unrealistically simulates real-life audio degradation during training, resulting in sub-optimal supervision. Additionally, although several modern metric learning approaches have been proposed, current neural AFP methods continue to rely on the NT-Xent loss without exploring the recent advances or classical alternatives. In this work, we propose a series of best practices to enhance the self-supervision by leveraging musical signal properties and realistic room acoustics. We then present the first systematic evaluation of various metric learning approaches in the context of AFP, demonstrating that a self-supervised adaptation of the triplet loss yields superior performance. Our results also reveal that training with multiple positive samples per anchor has critically different effects across loss functions. Our approach is built upon these insights and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both a large, synthetically degraded dataset and a real-world dataset recorded using microphones in diverse music venues.

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arXiv2025

Supervised contrastive learning from weakly-labeled audio segments for musical version matching

Detecting musical versions (different renditions of the same piece) is a challenging task with important applications. Because of the ground truth nature, existing approaches match musical versions at the track level (e.g., whole song). However, most applications require to match them at the segment level (e.g., 20s chunks). In addition, existing approaches resort to classification and triplet losses, disregarding more recent losses that could bring meaningful improvements. In this paper, we propose a method to learn from weakly annotated segments, together with a contrastive loss variant that outperforms well-studied alternatives. The former is based on pairwise segment distance reductions, while the latter modifies an existing loss following decoupling, hyper-parameter, and geometric considerations. With these two elements, we do not only achieve state-of-the-art results in the standard track-level evaluation, but we also obtain a breakthrough performance in a segment-level evaluation. We believe that, due to the generality of the challenges addressed here, the proposed methods may find utility in domains beyond audio or musical version matching.

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arXiv2024

Discogs-VI: A Musical Version Identification Dataset Based on Public Editorial Metadata

Current version identification (VI) datasets often lack sufficient size and musical diversity to train robust neural networks (NNs). Additionally, their non-representative clique size distributions prevent realistic system evaluations. To address these challenges, we explore the untapped potential of the rich editorial metadata in the Discogs music database and create a large dataset of musical versions containing about 1,900,000 versions across 348,000 cliques. Utilizing a high-precision search algorithm, we map this dataset to official music uploads on YouTube, resulting in a dataset of approximately 493,000 versions across 98,000 cliques. This dataset offers over nine times the number of cliques and over four times the number of versions than existing datasets. We demonstrate the utility of our dataset by training a baseline NN without extensive model complexities or data augmentations, which achieves competitive results on the SHS100K and Da-TACOS datasets. Our dataset, along with the tools used for its creation, the extracted audio features, and a trained model, are all publicly available online.

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arXiv2022

Universal Speech Enhancement with Score-based Diffusion

Removing background noise from speech audio has been the subject of considerable effort, especially in recent years due to the rise of virtual communication and amateur recordings. Yet background noise is not the only unpleasant disturbance that can prevent intelligibility: reverb, clipping, codec artifacts, problematic equalization, limited bandwidth, or inconsistent loudness are equally disturbing and ubiquitous. In this work, we propose to consider the task of speech enhancement as a holistic endeavor, and present a universal speech enhancement system that tackles 55 different distortions at the same time. Our approach consists of a generative model that employs score-based diffusion, together with a multi-resolution conditioning network that performs enhancement with mixture density networks. We show that this approach significantly outperforms the state of the art in a subjective test performed by expert listeners. We also show that it achieves competitive objective scores with just 4-8 diffusion steps, despite not considering any particular strategy for fast sampling. We hope that both our methodology and technical contributions encourage researchers and practitioners to adopt a universal approach to speech enhancement, possibly framing it as a generative task.

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