Target-Specific Dataset Pruning for Compression of Audio Tagging Models

Large audio tagging models are usually trained or pre-trained on AudioSet, a dataset that encompasses a large amount of different sound classes and acoustic environments. Knowledge distillation has emerged as a method to compress such models without compromising their effectiveness. There are many different applications for audio tagging, some of which require a specialization to a narrow domain of sounds to be classified. For these scenarios, it is beneficial to distill the large audio tagger with respect to a specific subset of sounds of interest. A method to prune a general dataset with respect to a target dataset is presented. By distilling with such a specialized pruned dataset, we obtain a compressed model with better classification accuracy in the specific target domain than with target-agnostic distillation.