Cited by 22Music and Audio ProcessingAnimal Vocal Communication and BehaviorDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

Impact of transfer learning methods and dataset characteristics on generalization in birdsong classification

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Ghani, Burooj, Kalkman, Vincent J., Planqué, Bob, Vellinga, Willem-Pier, Gill, Lisa, Stowell, Dan·2025·Scientific Reports

Abstract

Animal sounds can be recognised automatically by machine learning, and this has an important role to play in biodiversity monitoring. Yet despite increasingly impressive capabilities, bioacoustic species classifiers still exhibit imbalanced performance across species and habitats, especially in complex soundscapes. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of transfer learning in large-scale bird sound classification across various conditions, including single- and multi-label scenarios, and across different model architectures such as CNNs and Transformers. Our experiments demonstrate that both finetuning and knowledge distillation yield strong performance, with cross-distillation proving particularly effective in improving in-domain performance on Xeno-canto data. However, when generalizing to soundscapes, shallow finetuning exhibits superior performance compared to knowledge distillation, highlighting its robustness and constrained nature. Our study further investigates how to use multi-species labels, in cases where these are present but incomplete. We advocate for more comprehensive labeling practices within the animal sound community, including annotating background species and providing temporal details, to enhance the training of robust bird sound classifiers. These findings provide insights into the optimal reuse of pretrained models for advancing automatic bioacoustic recognition.

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  • Models trained in one acoustic environment may struggle to generalize across different habitats, recording devices, or background soundscapes.

    “Models trained in one acoustic environment may also struggle to generalize across different habitats, recording devices, or background soundscapes”

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. [33]Yosinski. J., Clune, J., Bengio, Y., & Lipson H. How transferable are features in deep neural networks? Advances in neural information processing systems 2014;27.
  2. [39]Touvron, H. et al. Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention. In: International conference on machine learning PMLR; 2021. p. 10347–10357.
  3. [54]Boudiaf, M., Denton, T., Van Merriënboer, B., Dumoulin, V. & Triantafillou, E. In search for a generalizable method for source free domain adaptation. In: International Conference on Machine Learning PMLR; 2023. p. 2914–2931.

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Authors
Ghani, B., Kalkman, V. J., Planqué, B., Vellinga, W.-P., Gill, L., & Stowell, D.
Affiliations
Naturalis Biodiversity Center (NL)
Corresponding author
Ghani, Burooj
Venue
Scientific Reports
Published
2025-05-09
Volume
15
Issue
1
Pages
16273-16273
ISSN
2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4410224488
Cited by
22
References
42
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 6
FWCI
10.30
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Scientific Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • The Digital Academic Repository of Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Naturalis Biodiversity Center) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
  • MAMBO (101060639)
  • GUARDEN (101060693)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Music and Audio Processing
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Developmental Biology › Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
transfer learning, knowledge distillation, fine-tuning, multi-label classification, soundscape, biodiversity monitoring, Xeno-canto, pre-trained models, convolutional neural networks, transformer models
MeSH terms
Machine Learning, Animals, Birds, Vocalization, Animal

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