Ensemble-Guided Model for Performance Enhancement in Model-Complexity-Limited Acoustic Scene Classification

In recent acoustic scene classification (ASC) models, various auxiliary methods to enhance performance have been applied, e.g., subsystem ensembles and data augmentations. Particularly, the ensembles of several submodels may be effective in the ASC models, but there is a problem with increasing the size of the model because it contains several submodels. Therefore, it is hard to be used in model-complexity-limited ASC tasks. In this paper, we would like to find the performance enhancement method while taking advantage of the model ensemble technique without increasing the model size. Our method is proposed based on a mean-teacher model, which is developed for consistency learning in semi-supervised learning. Because our problem is supervised learning, which is different from the purpose of the conventional mean-teacher model, we modify detailed strategies to maximize the consistency learning performance. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, experiments were performed with an ASC database from the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 2021 Task 1A. The small-sized ASC model with our proposed method improved the log loss performance up to 1.009 and the F₁-score performance by 67.12%, whereas the vanilla ASC model showed a log loss of 1.052 and an F₁-score of 65.79%.