---
abstract: 'The study of label noise in sound event recognition has recently gained attention with the advent of larger and noisier datasets. This work addresses the problem of [*missing labels*]{}, one of the big weaknesses of large audio datasets, and one of the most conspicuous issues for AudioSet. We propose a simple and model-agnostic method based on a teacher-student framework with loss masking to first identify the most critical missing label candidates, and then ignore their contribution during the learning process. We find that a simple optimisation of the training label set improves recognition performance without additional computation. We discover that most of the improvement comes from ignoring a critical tiny portion of the missing labels. We also show that the damage done by missing labels is larger as the training set gets smaller, yet it can still be observed even when training with massive amounts of audio. We believe these insights can generalize to other large-scale datasets.'
author:
- |
    Eduardo Fonseca, , Shawn Hershey, Manoj Plakal,\
    Daniel P. W. Ellis, , Aren Jansen, , and R. Channing Moore [^1] [^2]
bibliography:
- 'refs.bib'
title: |
    Addressing Missing Labels in Large-Scale Sound\
    Event Recognition Using a Teacher-Student\
    Framework With Loss Masking
---

Sound event recognition, label noise, missing labels, teacher-student, loss masking

Introduction {#sec:intro}
============

Missing Labels in AudioSet {#sec:missing}
==========================

Method {#sec:method}
======

Experimental Setup {#sec:setup}
==================

Experiments {#sec:experiments}
===========

Conclusion {#sec:conclusion}
==========

Supplemental Material
=====================

[^1]: E. Fonseca is with the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain (eduardo.fonseca@upf.edu). This work was conducted while E. Fonseca was interning at Google Research.

[^2]: S. Hershey, M. Plakal, D. P. W. Ellis, A. Jansen and R. C. Moore are with Google Research, New York, USA ({shershey,plakal,dpwe,arenjansen,channingmoore}@google.com).
