voc2vec

voc2vec

voc2vec is a foundation model specifically designed for non-verbal human data.

We employed a collection of 10 datasets covering around 125 hours of non-verbal audio and pre-trained a Wav2Vec2-like model.

Model description

Voc2vec is built upon the wav2vec 2.0 framework and follows its pre-training setup. The pre-training datasets include: AudioSet (vocalization), FreeSound (babies), HumanVoiceDataset, NNIME, NonSpeech7K, ReCANVo, SingingDatabase, TUT (babies), VocalSketch, VocalSound.

Task and datasets description

We evaluate voc2vec on six datasets: ASVP-ESD, ASPV-ESD (babies), CNVVE, NonVerbal Vocalization Dataset, Donate a Cry, VIVAE.

The following table reports the average performance in terms of Unweighted Average Recall (UAR) and F1 Macro across the six datasets described above.

Available Models

Usage examples

You can use the model directly in the following manner:

import torch
import librosa
from transformers import AutoModelForAudioClassification, AutoFeatureExtractor

## Load an audio file
audio_array, sr = librosa.load("path_to_audio.wav", sr=16000)

## Load model and feature extractor
model = AutoModelForAudioClassification.from_pretrained("alkiskoudounas/voc2vec")
feature_extractor = AutoFeatureExtractor.from_pretrained("alkiskoudounas/voc2vec")

## Extract features
inputs = feature_extractor(audio_array.squeeze(), sampling_rate=feature_extractor.sampling_rate, padding=True, return_tensors="pt")

## Compute logits
logits = model(**inputs).logits

BibTeX entry and citation info

@INPROCEEDINGS{koudounas2025icassp,
  author={Koudounas, Alkis and La Quatra, Moreno and Siniscalchi, Sabato Marco and Baralis, Elena},
  booktitle={ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)}, 
  title={voc2vec: A Foundation Model for Non-Verbal Vocalization}, 
  year={2025},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-5},
  keywords={Pediatrics;Accuracy;Foundation models;Benchmark testing;Signal processing;Data models;Acoustics;Speech processing;Nonverbal vocalization;Representation Learning;Self-Supervised Models;Pre-trained Models},
  doi={10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10890672}}