S-SONDO: Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation for General Audio Foundation Models

General audio foundation models have recently achieved remarkable progress, enabling strong performance across diverse tasks. However, state-of-the-art models remain extremely large, often with hundreds of millions of parameters, leading to high inference costs and limited deployability on edge devices. Knowledge distillation is a proven strategy for model compression, but prior work in audio has mostly focused on supervised settings, relying on class logits, intermediate features, or architecture-specific techniques. Such assumptions exclude models that output only embeddings, such as self-supervised or metric-learning models. We introduce S-SONDO (Self-Supervised KnOwledge DistillatioN for General AuDio FOundation Models), the first framework to distill general audio models using only their output embeddings. By avoiding the need for logits or layer-level alignment, S-SONDO is architecture-agnostic and broadly applicable to embedding-based teachers. We demonstrate its effectiveness by distilling two audio foundation models into three efficient students that are up to 61 times smaller while retaining up to 96% of teacher performance. We also provide practical insights on loss choice and clustering-based balanced data sampling. Code is available here: https://github.com/MedAliAdlouni/ssondo.

Masked Latent Prediction and Classification for Self-Supervised Audio Representation Learning

Recently, self-supervised learning methods based on masked latent prediction have proven to encode input data into powerful representations. However, during training, the learned latent space can be further transformed to extract higher-level information that could be more suited for downstream classification tasks. Therefore, we propose a new method: MAsked latenT Prediction And Classification (MATPAC), which is trained with two pretext tasks solved jointly. As in previous work, the first pretext task is a masked latent prediction task, ensuring a robust input representation in the latent space. The second one is unsupervised classification, which utilises the latent representations of the first pretext task to match probability distributions between a teacher and a student. We validate the MATPAC method by comparing it to other state-of-the-art proposals and conducting ablations studies. MATPAC reaches state-of-the-art self-supervised learning results on reference audio classification datasets such as OpenMIC, GTZAN, ESC-50 and US8K and outperforms comparable supervised methods results for musical auto-tagging on Magna-tag-a-tune.

A fully differentiable model for unsupervised singing voice separation

A novel model was recently proposed by Schulze-Forster et al. in [1] for unsupervised music source separation. This model allows to tackle some of the major shortcomings of existing source separation frameworks. Specifically, it eliminates the need for isolated sources during training, performs efficiently with limited data, and can handle homogeneous sources (such as singing voice). But, this model relies on an external multipitch estimator and incorporates an Ad hoc voice assignment procedure. In this paper, we propose to extend this framework and to build a fully differentiable model by integrating a multipitch estimator and a novel differentiable assignment module within the core model. We show the merits of our approach through a set of experiments, and we highlight in particular its potential for processing diverse and unseen data.