{"ID":5675283,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-03T01:40:09.565152011Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-07T01:06:03.009715918Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01974","arxiv_id":"2607.01974","title":"A Multi-Branch Hierarchy-Aware Framework for Heterogeneous Audio Classification","abstract":"This technical report describes our system for Task 1 of the DCASE 2026 Challenge, which aims to classify heterogeneous audio recordings according to the Broad Sound Taxonomy (BST). The task requires both accurate second-level prediction and consistency with the top-level taxonomy. Our system is built on CLAP-based audio-text representations and is improved along three strategies: expanding the training set with a filtered subset of BSD35k, enhancing acoustic modeling with feature-specific branches, and refining predictions using hierarchy-aware classifiers and KNN-based post-processing. Among the acoustic features considered, the log-STFT branch provides the strongest single-model performance. With KNN-based post-processing, our best single system achieves a hierarchical F1 score (Hier. F1) of 80.84% on the BSD10k-v1.2 set under the same evaluation protocol as the baseline. We further construct ensemble systems by combining models with complementary acoustic features and classification heads, achieving Hier. F1 scores of 81.25% and 81.18%, respectively.","short_abstract":"This technical report describes our system for Task 1 of the DCASE 2026 Challenge, which aims to classify heterogeneous audio recordings according to the Broad Sound Taxonomy (BST). The task requires both accurate second-level prediction and consistency with the top-level taxonomy. Our system is built on CLAP-based aud...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01974","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.01974v1","authors":"[\"Beile Ning\",\"Jiayi Yu\",\"Zitong Wang\",\"Yufei Hu\",\"Wenjun Xu\",\"Yuanhang Qian\",\"Zhongxin Bai\",\"Gongping Huang\"]","published":"2026-07-02T10:08:24Z","proceeding":"cs.SD","tasks":"[\"cs.SD\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}