BeatKAN: An Efficient and Drum-Attuned Beat Tracking Method Using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

In this paper, we propose an efficient and drum-attuned beat tracking method based on Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KAN). Traditional MLP-based frameworks struggle with complex musical signals due to limited capacity in modeling intricate patterns. Inspired by KAN’s efficient ability to capture complex time-frequency relationships, we leverage it to enhance our model by employing learnable nonlinear activation functions on convolutional kernels. Additionally, we utilize music source separation techniques to extract drum tracks from the original audio, thereby expanding the existing beat datasets and simulating the human perception of beats through drum sounds. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the parameter count while maintaining high accuracy in beat tracking.