---
license: mit
datasets:
- agkphysics/AudioSet
language:
- en
pipeline_tag: audio-classification
library_name: fairseq
tags:
- self-supervised-learning
- audio-self-supervised-learning
- SSL
- AudioSet
- AudioSSL
- AudioEncoder
---
# 🔊 [ICLR 2025] SSLAM: Enhancing Self-Supervised Models with Audio Mixtures for Polyphonic Soundscapes

[![Conference Paper](https://img.shields.io/badge/ICLR-2025-blue)](https://openreview.net/forum?id=odU59TxdiB)

🚀 **SSLAM** is a self-supervised learning framework designed to enhance audio representation quality for both **polyphonic(multiple overlapping sounds)** and monophonic soundscapes. Unlike traditional SSL models that focus on monophonic data, SSLAM introduces a novel **source retention loss** and **audio mixture training**, significantly improving performance on real-world polyphonic audio.

🔗  **[Github](https://github.com/ta012/SSLAM) | [Paper](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=odU59TxdiB) | [Open Review](https://openreview.net/forum?id=odU59TxdiB) |[🤗 Models](https://huggingface.co/ta012/SSLAM) | [Models(Google Drive)](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1G0icv-hdqDEqnfP4EFszMXhFnWWM09gT?usp=sharing)**

# 📋 Table of Contents
- [Why SSLAM?](#why-sslam)
- [Key Features](#key-features)
- [Results](#results)
- [Inference Mode](#️inference-mode)
  - [Inference Installation](#inference-installation)
  - [Model Weights](#model-weights)
  - [Using SSLAM](#using-sslam)
- [Acknowledgements](#acknowledgements)
- [Citation](#citation)


## 🔍Why SSLAM? 
🔊 **Real-world audio is polyphonic**—multiple overlapping sound sources are common in everyday environments.  
❌ **Existing SSL models focus on monophonic audio,** limiting their ability to generalize to real-world scenarios. Their benchmarks are primarily monophonic, and their pre-training does not account for polyphonic environments.   
💡 **SSLAM bridges this gap** by introducing **self-supervised learning from audio mixtures**, enabling robust learning across **both monophonic and polyphonic soundscapes**.


## 🎼Key Features
✅ **Self-Supervised Learning from Audio Mixtures (SSLAM)** – improving robustness to real-world polyphonic audio  (multiple overlapping sounds).  
✅ **Source Retention Loss** – ensures the integrity of each sound source even in complex mixtures.  
✅ **SOTA Performance** – Achieves **+3.9% mAP improvement** on AudioSet-2M and **+9.1% on polyphonic datasets**.  


## 📊Results

### 1. Standard Audio-SSL Benchmark Datasets
![Standard Audio-SSL Benchmark](assets/as2m_results.png)

### 2. Polyphonic Datasets
![Polyphonic Datasets](assets/poly_results.png)


## **🔍️Inference Mode**
> **Note**: If you are already using [EAT](https://github.com/cwx-worst-one/EAT/tree/main) in your evaluation/inference pipeline, you can simply replace the weights with SSLAM weights, as the inference and evaluation code is identical to EAT.

If not, follow the steps below for installation:
## 📥Inference Installation

```bash
conda create --prefix /path/to/sslam_eval_env -y python=3.9.13
/path/to/sslam_eval_env/bin/python -m pip install pip==24.0 # downgrade pip
##clone SSLAM
git clone https://github.com/ta012/SSLAM.git
cd SSLAM/
/path/to/sslam_eval_env/bin/pip install -r SSLAM_Inference/requirements_sslam_eval.txt
```
#### 🚀**Using SSLAM**

We provide scripts to use SSLAM in the following ways:

##### 1. **Audio Feature (Representation) Extraction Using SSLAM Encoder**

```bash
cd SSLAM_Inference/scripts
bash feature_extract.sh
```

##### 2. **Inference on Single Audio WAV File**

```bash
cd SSLAM_Inference/scripts
bash inference.sh
```

##### 3. **Evaluation on AudioSet-2M Evaluation Set**

```bash
cd SSLAM_Inference/scripts
bash evaluate_AS2M_finetuned.sh # Reported mAP: 50.2
```



## 🙏Acknowledgements

Our code is primarily based on [EAT](https://github.com/cwx-worst-one/EAT/tree/main) and [data2vec 2.0](https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/main/examples/data2vec)  with additional concepts and components adapted from  [AudioMAE](https://github.com/facebookresearch/AudioMAE).


## 📜Citation

If you find our work useful, please cite it as:  

```bibtex
@inproceedings{alex2025sslam,
  title={{SSLAM}: Enhancing Self-Supervised Models with Audio Mixtures for Polyphonic Soundscapes},
  author={Tony Alex and Sara Atito and Armin Mustafa and Muhammad Awais and Philip J B Jackson},
  booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2025},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=odU59TxdiB}
}