Takehiro Imamura | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

CASTELLA: Long Audio Dataset with Captions and Temporal Boundaries

We introduce CASTELLA, a human-annotated audio benchmark for the task of audio moment retrieval (AMR). Although AMR has various useful potential applications, there is still no established benchmark with real-world data. The initial study of AMR trained the models solely on synthetic datasets. Moreover, the evaluation is based on an annotated dataset of fewer than 100 samples. This resulted in less reliable reported performance. To ensure performance for applications in real-world environments, we present CASTELLA, a large-scale manually annotated AMR dataset. CASTELLA consists of 1009, 213, and 640 audio recordings for training, validation, and test splits, respectively, which is 24 times larger than the previous dataset. We also establish a baseline model for AMR using CASTELLA. Our experiments demonstrate that a model fine-tuned on CASTELLA after pre-training on the synthetic data outperformed a model trained solely on the synthetic data by 10.4 points in Recall1@0.7. CASTELLA is publicly available in https://h-munakata.github.io/CASTELLA-demo/.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Music Similarity Representation Learning Focusing on Individual Instruments with Source Separation and Human Preference

This paper proposes music similarity representation learning (MSRL) based on individual instrument sounds (InMSRL) utilizing music source separation (MSS) and human preference without requiring clean instrument sounds during inference. We propose three methods that effectively improve performance. First, we introduce end-to-end fine-tuning (E2E-FT) for the Cascade approach that sequentially performs MSS and music similarity feature extraction. E2E-FT allows the model to minimize the adverse effects of a separation error on the feature extraction. Second, we propose multi-task learning for the Direct approach that directly extracts disentangled music similarity features using a single music similarity feature extractor. Multi-task learning, which is based on the disentangled music similarity feature extraction and MSS based on reconstruction with disentangled music similarity features, further enhances instrument feature disentanglement. Third, we employ perception-aware fine-tuning (PAFT). PAFT utilizes human preference, allowing the model to perform InMSRL aligned with human perceptual similarity. We conduct experimental evaluations and demonstrate that 1) E2E-FT for Cascade significantly improves InMSRL performance, 2) the multi-task learning for Direct is also helpful to improve disentanglement performance in the feature extraction, 3) PAFT significantly enhances the perceptual InMSRL performance, and 4) Cascade with E2E-FT and PAFT outperforms Direct with the multi-task learning and PAFT.

cs.SD↗