---
license: cc-by-4.0
tags:
  - audio
  - audio-classification
  - multi-label
  - sound-event-detection
  - fsd50k
  - pytorch
library_name: apcen-multihead-tagger
datasets:
  - Fhrozen/FSD50k
metrics:
  - lwlrap
  - mean_average_precision
---

# apcen-multihead-tagger — FSD50K (200 labels)

Efficient multi-label audio tagging with a **learned, physically-grounded front-end**
(ERB SuperGaussian filter bank + **adaptive PCEN / APCEN**) and a **three-head model on
a shared encoder** (peak-pool / modulation-spectrum / transformer-SED) fused by a
per-class gate. **5.06M parameters**, trained **from scratch on FSD50K — no AudioSet
pretraining**.

**Code:** https://github.com/Thomas-Durand-Texte/apcen-multihead-tagger

## Quick start

```bash
pip install git+https://github.com/Thomas-Durand-Texte/apcen-multihead-tagger
```

```python
from apcen_multihead_tagger.model import ApcenMultiheadTagger

# No argument → downloads this checkpoint from the Hub (cached afterwards).
model = ApcenMultiheadTagger.from_pretrained()
probs = model.predict(waveform)      # [B, 200] sigmoid probabilities, mono @ 44.1 kHz
print(model.labels[:3])              # ['Accelerating_and_revving_and_vroom', 'Accordion', ...]
```

Or from the command line — `--weights` defaults to this repo:

```bash
python -m apcen_multihead_tagger.infer --input clip.wav --topk 5
```

## Files

| file | what it is |
|---|---|
| `best_model.pt` | the released checkpoint — EMA weights + the 200-label `vocabulary`, 21.5 MB |
| `configs/waveform_cnn-19.yaml`, `configs/shared.yaml` | the exact architecture config (also bundled in the package) |

The checkpoint is a plain `torch.save` payload: `model_state_dict` (EMA weights),
`vocabulary` (200 class names, index-aligned to the logits), and the selection metadata
(`epoch`, `val_lwlrap`, `val_mAP`). Optimizer/scheduler state was stripped for release.

## Model description

- **Front-end:** STFT → analytical ERB SuperGaussian filter bank (72 bands, 50 Hz–20 kHz)
  → **APCEN** ([arXiv:2510.18206](https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18206)), a learned closed-loop
  per-band automatic gain control → learned 2D front-end.
- **Encoder:** factorized time-frequency (freq-first, frequency-dynamic conv, sub-spectral norm).
- **Heads:** three reducers with different temporal inductive biases (pool 86 fps /
  modulation-spectrum 43 fps / transformer-SED), fused by a **per-class gate**; each head
  adds an auxiliary loss that co-supervises the shared encoder.
- **Output:** `[B, 200]` logits → `sigmoid` → per-class probabilities.

## Intended use

- **Inference / tagging:** predict FSD50K sound-event tags for audio clips.
- **Transfer / fine-tuning:** a compact backbone for your own labelled audio (see the repo's
  `fine_tune.py`; full fine-tune or `--freeze-backbone` feature-extraction).
- **Feature extraction** for downstream audio tasks.

Not intended for speaker ID, transcription, or any safety-critical use.

## Metrics (FSD50K validation)

| metric | value |
|---|---|
| lwlrap | **0.735** |
| mAP (macro) | **0.601** |
| params | 5.06M |

Checkpoint selection: **best macro-mAP epoch (65)**, EMA weights. Macro mAP weights every
class equally, so this selection favours the long tail; the lwlrap-best epoch (70) scores
0.7350 / 0.5992 — a 0.0002 lwlrap trade for +0.002 mAP.

This is the **wc19** line. A larger successor (11.46M params, analytical SuperGaussian
filter bank, transformer-only head) is still training and will be published separately —
it does not supersede this checkpoint yet.

Per-head (single-head readouts on the same encoder): transformer **0.734 lwlrap /
0.598 mAP**, pool 0.664 / 0.497, modulation 0.638 / 0.454. Honest note: at maturity the
per-class gate largely concentrates on the transformer head — the pool/modulation heads'
*fusion* contribution is small (~+0.003 mAP); their main value is the **encoder
co-supervision** during training.

## Training data

**FSD50K** (Fonseca et al., 2022) — 200 labels, ~41k clips, **CC-BY 4.0**. Weak
(clip-level) labels, 44.1 kHz. No label corrections applied to this pretrain.

## Limitations & biases

- Weak clip-level labels; no temporal event boundaries.
- Long-tailed label distribution — rare classes are harder.
- Trained on FSD50K's Freesound-sourced audio; domain shift (recording conditions,
  languages, unseen event types) will degrade performance.
- The FSD50K vocabulary is hierarchical (`Purr` and `Animal` can both fire) — treat the
  scores as a multi-label set, not a single argmax.

## License & attribution

- **Code:** MIT.
- **Weights / dataset:** derived from **FSD50K**, released under **CC-BY 4.0** —
  attribute FSD50K (Fonseca, Favory, Pons, Font, Serra, *"FSD50K: an Open Dataset of
  Human-Labeled Sound Events"*, IEEE/ACM TASLP 2022) when redistributing.

## Citation

If APCEN is central to your use, cite the adaptive-PCEN work (arXiv:2510.18206) and FSD50K.