# The Unbearable Weight: Scaling Models and Methods for UAV Audio Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17884 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17884/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01778/) (2021)
- [Scaling & Shifting Your Features: A New Baseline for Efficient Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08823/) (2022)
- [Controlling Text-to-Image Diffusion by Orthogonal Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07280/) (2023)
- [Training BatchNorm and Only BatchNorm: On the Expressive Power of Random Features in CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00152/) (2020)
- [A Review of Deep Transfer Learning and Recent Advancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09679/) (2022)
- [Rethinking CNN Models for Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11154/) (2020)
- [UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles): Diverse Applications of UAV Datasets in Segmentation, Classification, Detection, and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03245/) (2024)
- [Advance and Refinement: The Evolution of UAV Detection and Classification Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05985/) (2024)
- [Spectral and Rhythm Features for Audio Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06927/) (2024)
- [4,500 Seconds: Small Data Training Approaches for Deep UAV Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23782/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become increasingly prevalent in consumer and defense settings, classifying them reliably from limited, modality-specific data is an urgent challenge. The dominant approach, large pretrained networks fully fine-tuned on task data, carries a substantial computational and memory weight that is hard to bear in resource-constrained UAV deployments, where edge inference and rapid retraining for emerging platforms are both required. This paper systematically scales across both model architectures and fine-tuning methods for UAV audio classification, asking when that weight is justified and when lighter alternatives prevail. Using a custom dataset of 3,100 audio clips spanning 31 drone classes, we evaluate transformer (ViT, AST) and convolutional (custom CNN, ResNet-18/152, MobileNet-V3-S/L, EfficientNet-B0/B7) backbones under full fine-tuning, classifier-only fine-tuning, and four parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods: SSF, IA3, OFT, and selective batch-norm tuning. All configurations are evaluated with 5-fold cross-validation across accuracy, training time, trainable-parameter share, and inference-time memory footprint. Selective batch-norm fine-tuning of EfficientNet-B7 with three-fold augmentations achieves the highest validation accuracy (97.65% +- 0.30) while updating under 0.5% of model parameters. Across the sweep, lightweight CNNs consistently outperform transformers on both accuracy and efficiency. For UAV audio classification under data scarcity, scaling the method outperforms scaling the model.