animal2vec and MeerKAT: A self-supervised transformer for rare-event raw audio input and a large-scale reference dataset for bioacoustics

arXiv:2406.01253v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bioacoustic research, vital for understanding animal behavior, conservation, and ecology, faces a monumental challenge: analyzing vast datasets where animal vocalizations are rare. While deep learning techniques are becoming standard, adapting them to bioacoustics remains difficult. We address this with animal2vec, an interpretable large transformer model, and a self-supervised training scheme tailored for sparse and unbalanced bioacousti