Supervised contrastive learning from weakly-labeled audio segments for musical version matching
This addresses the challenge of detecting different renditions of musical pieces at a fine-grained segment level, which is important for applications like music retrieval, but the approach is incremental as it builds on existing contrastive learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of matching musical versions at the segment level, proposing a method with weakly-labeled segments and a contrastive loss variant that achieves state-of-the-art results in both track-level and breakthrough performance in segment-level evaluations.
Detecting musical versions (different renditions of the same piece) is a challenging task with important applications. Because of the ground truth nature, existing approaches match musical versions at the track level (e.g., whole song). However, most applications require to match them at the segment level (e.g., 20s chunks). In addition, existing approaches resort to classification and triplet losses, disregarding more recent losses that could bring meaningful improvements. In this paper, we propose a method to learn from weakly annotated segments, together with a contrastive loss variant that outperforms well-studied alternatives. The former is based on pairwise segment distance reductions, while the latter modifies an existing loss following decoupling, hyper-parameter, and geometric considerations. With these two elements, we do not only achieve state-of-the-art results in the standard track-level evaluation, but we also obtain a breakthrough performance in a segment-level evaluation. We believe that, due to the generality of the challenges addressed here, the proposed methods may find utility in domains beyond audio or musical version matching.