BAHBench: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Bio-Acoustic Health With Acoustic Foundation Models

Acoustic foundation models, through self-supervised learning on large amounts of unlabeled speech data, can acquire rich acoustic representations. In recent years, these models have demonstrated substantial potential in audio-based health-related tasks, remarkably enhancing the efficiency and quality of healthcare services and contributing to the advancement of smart healthcare. However, there is currently a lack of systematic research and exploration on the performance of acoustic foundation models in health-related tasks. Furthermore, inconsistencies in evaluation methods and experimental setups hinder fair comparisons between different methods, severely impeding progress in this field. To address these challenges, we establish a unified Benchmark for evaluating Bio-Acoustic health via acoustic foundation models, namely BAHBench. BAHBench encompasses 6 distinct health-related tasks and evaluates 12 acoustic foundation models within a unified evaluation framework and parameter settings, enabling fair comparisons across different models. Our objective is to explore the effectiveness of current acoustic foundation models in health-related tasks. Thus, we discuss the impact of model size and data diversity on performance, and investigate feature selection and efficient fine-tuning strategy. Experimental results show that different health-related tasks benefit from features from different layers of the foundation model, while LoRA fine-tuning further enhances the model's performance on downstream tasks. Our goal is to provide clear and comprehensive guidance for future researchers. The code related to this study will be available to the research community to promote transparency and reproducibility.