# Training sound event detection with soft labels from crowdsourced annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.14572 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14572/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Data-Driven Estimation of the False Positive Rate of the Bayes Binary Classifier via Soft Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15500/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Classification Systems Against Soft Labels with Fuzzy Precision and Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13938/) (2023)
- [Energy Consumption Trends in Sound Event Detection Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08763/) (2024)
- [Double Mixture: Towards Continual Event Detection from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13289/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study the use of soft labels to train a system for sound event detection (SED). Soft labels can result from annotations which account for human uncertainty about categories, or emerge as a natural representation of multiple opinions in annotation. Converting annotations to hard labels results in unambiguous categories for training, at the cost of losing the details about the labels distribution. This work investigates how soft labels can be used, and what benefits they bring in training a SED system. The results show that the system is capable of learning information about the activity of the sounds which is reflected in the soft labels and is able to detect sounds that are missed in the typical binary target training setup. We also release a new dataset produced through crowdsourcing, containing temporally strong labels for sound events in real-life recordings, with both soft and hard labels.