MetaPerch: Learning from metadata for bioacoustics foundation models
Primary research
#52
- Canonical URL
- http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14072v1
- Topic
- Research Misc
- First seen
- 2026-07-16 19:07:58
- Last seen
- 2026-07-16 19:07:58
Source raw items (1)
- arXiv2026-07-16 19:06:49MetaPerch: Learning from metadata for bioacoustics foundation models
Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data. Recent work has shown that supervision alone can produce SotA species detection models when trained on this large-scale data -- however, there remains unutilized potential in the form of recording metadata readily available within these community-driven data hubs. In this work, we explore the use of metadata -- such as location and time -- as auxiliary supervision signals, allowing the model to leverage species-metadata correlations in its learned representation. Auxiliary metadata losses provide additional information beyond vocalizations alone that can encourage a richer, more robust representation that generalizes better to species distribution and acoustic domain shifts -- important challenges for deployment in real-world passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) settings. We introduce MetaPerch, a new foundation model that achieves strong species identification performance across multiple challenging domains and present an extensive empirical study of the effects of 9 diverse metadata sources on 17 bioacoustic datasets.