Characterizing continual learning scenarios and strategies for audio analysis
摘要
Audio analysis is used in many real-world applications, but most methods assume a fixed data distribution. In practice, data can shift over time due to changes in distribution or the appearance of new classes, reducing model performance. Traditional deep learning models fail to adapt, making continual learning (CL) crucial. While some studies explore CL for audio, they mainly focus on a class-incremental scenario and largely ignore a domain-incremental scenario. In applications such as anomaly detection and monitoring, domain incremental scenarios are prevalent. To the best of our knowledge, no existing comprehensive benchmark for audio data supports both domain-incremental and class-incremental learning scenarios. To bridge this gap, we have curated a benchmark using the DCASE dataset (2020–2023) that properly considers both scenarios. Previous works have primarily explored anomaly detection approaches where new classes are treated as anomalies. Our work complements these approaches by examining anomaly detection within established classes, which is crucial for audio applications involving rare or unexpected sounds within known classes. We use the proposed dataset to compare regularization-based (EWC, LwF, and SI) and rehearsal-based (GEM, A-GEM, GDumb, Replay, DER++, and Co