Improving Domain Generalization for Sound Classification with Sparse Frequency-Regularized Transformer

Sound classification models’ performance suffers from generalizing on out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Numerous methods have been proposed to help the model generalize. However, most either introduce inference overheads or focus on long-lasting CNN-variants, while Transformers has been proven to outperform CNNs on numerous natural language processing and computer vision tasks. We propose FRITO, an effective regularization technique on Transformer’s self-attention, to improve the model’s generalization ability by limiting each sequence position’s attention receptive field along the frequency dimension on the spectrogram. Experiments show that our method helps Transformer models achieve SOTA generalization performance on TAU 2020 and Nsynth datasets while saving 20% inference time.