The Unbearable Weight: Scaling Models and Methods for UAV Audio Classification

📅 2026-09-15
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了无人机音频分类中资源受限的问题,通过对比不同模型架构和微调方法,发现轻量级CNN在准确性和效率上优于大型预训练模型。
📝 Abstract
As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become increasingly prevalent in consumer and defense settings, classifying them reliably from limited, modality-specific data is an urgent challenge. The dominant approach, large pretrained networks fully fine-tuned on task data, carries a substantial computational and memory weight that is hard to bear in resource-constrained UAV deployments, where edge inference and rapid retraining for emerging platforms are both required. This paper systematically scales across both model architectures and fine-tuning methods for UAV audio classification, asking when that weight is justified and when lighter alternatives prevail. Using a custom dataset of 3,100 audio clips spanning 31 drone classes, we evaluate transformer (ViT, AST) and convolutional (custom CNN, ResNet-18/152, MobileNet-V3-S/L, EfficientNet-B0/B7) backbones under full fine-tuning, classifier-only fine-tuning, and four parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods: SSF, IA3, OFT, and selective batch-norm tuning. All configurations are evaluated with 5-fold cross-validation across accuracy, training time, trainable-parameter share, and inference-time memory footprint. Selective batch-norm fine-tuning of EfficientNet-B7 with three-fold augmentations achieves the highest validation accuracy (97.65% +- 0.30) while updating under 0.5% of model parameters. Across the sweep, lightweight CNNs consistently outperform transformers on both accuracy and efficiency. For UAV audio classification under data scarcity, scaling the method outperforms scaling the model.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

UAV Audio Classification
Resource-constrained Deployments
Edge Inference
Rapid Retraining
Data Scarcity
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

UAV Audio Classification
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT)
Lightweight CNNs
EfficientNet-B7
Selective Batch-Norm Tuning
A
Andrew P. Berg
Department of Computer Science, College of Charleston, Charleston SC, USA.
Q
Qian Zhang
Department of Engineering, College of Charleston, Charleston SC, USA.
M
Mia Y. Wang
Department of Computer Science, College of Charleston, Charleston SC, USA.