# Improving Audio Event Recognition with Consistency Regularization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10391/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01778/) (2021)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13289/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders that Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06405/) (2022)
- [Listen, Think, and Understand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10790/) (2023)
- [R-Drop: Regularized Dropout for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14448/) (2021)
- [GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11768/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Audio-Visual Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07839/) (2022)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Data Augmentation for Environmental Sound Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04363/) (2016)
- [CR-CTC: Consistency regularization on CTC for improved speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05101/) (2024)
- [SSLAM: Enhancing Self-Supervised Models with Audio Mixtures for Polyphonic Soundscapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12222/) (2025)
- [EquiAV: Leveraging Equivariance for Audio-Visual Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09502/) (2024)
- [Co-training 2L Submodels for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04884/) (2022)
- [Spatial Audio Processing with Large Language Model on Wearable Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08907/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Consistency regularization (CR), which enforces agreement between model predictions on augmented views, has found recent benefits in automatic speech recognition [1]. In this paper, we propose the use of consistency regularization for audio event recognition, and demonstrate its effectiveness on AudioSet. With extensive ablation studies for both small (~20k) and large (~1.8M) supervised training sets, we show that CR brings consistent improvement over supervised baselines which already heavily utilize data augmentation, and CR using stronger augmentation and multiple augmentations leads to additional gain for the small training set. Furthermore, we extend the use of CR into the semi-supervised setup with 20K labeled samples and 1.8M unlabeled samples, and obtain performance improvement over our best model trained on the small set.