Mtat Nsynth Fma Eval

---
name: mtat-nsynth-fma-eval
description: Evaluates the quality of self-supervised audio representations on three downstream tasks: music auto-tagging, instrument family classification, and music genre classification. It probes how well contrastive learning objectives capture semantic and structural musical features. Use when the user wants to benchmark on MTAT, NSynth, FMA, or asks about evaluating this task. Reports ROC-AUC.
metadata:
  skill_kind: dataset_eval
  source_arxiv: 2302.07077
  bibtex_key: [REDACTED]
  confidence: high
---

# mtat-nsynth-fma-eval

> Multi-Source Contrastive Learning from Musical Audio — Garoufis et al. (2023) (arXiv:2302.07077, 2023)

## What this evaluates

Evaluates the quality of self-supervised audio representations on three downstream tasks: music auto-tagging, instrument family classification, and music genre classification. It probes how well contrastive learning objectives capture semantic and structural musical features.

## Datasets

- **MTAT** — total ?; splits: train (-1), val (-1), test (-1); repo https://github.com/jongpillee/music_dataset_split
- **NSynth** — total 305979; splits: train (289205), val (12678), test (4096)
- **FMA** — total ?; splits: train (-1), val (-1), test (-1)

## Metrics

- `ROC-AUC` **(primary)** — range: [0, 1]
  - Macro average Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve computed over all tags for multi-label auto-tagging.
- `PR-AUC` — range: [0, 1]
  - Macro average Precision-Recall Area Under the Curve computed over all tags for multi-label auto-tagging.
- `WA (%)` — range: percent
  - Weighted Accuracy percentage computed over classes for instrument family and genre classification.

## Input / output format

**Input**: 1-second audio segments extracted from tracks.

**Output**: Per-segment prediction probabilities aggregated via averaging to produce instance-level predictions for multi-label tags or class labels.

## Scoring recipe

```python
def evaluate(segments, y_true, is_multilabel):
    # Aggregate per-segment predictions to instance level
    preds = average_segment_predictions(segments)
    
    if is_multilabel:
        roc_auc = macro_roc_auc(y_true, preds)
        pr_auc = macro_pr_auc(y_true, preds)
        return roc_auc, pr_auc
    else:
        wa = weighted_accuracy(y_true, preds)
        return wa

# Report mean over 5 independent runs with different random seeds
```

## Common pitfalls

- Models receive 1-sec segments, but evaluation aggregates predictions per instance (track) by averaging probabilities, not by majority vote or argmax.
- Metrics are macro-averaged over all tags/classes, not micro-averaged or per-class.
- Results are averaged over 5 independent runs with different random seeds, not a single split.

## Evidence (verbatim from paper)

> Since music auto-tagging constitutes a multi-instance multi-label task, we use the categorical cross-entropy as its loss function, and report on the macro average ROC-AUC and PR-AUC values over all tags. On the other hand, for both instrument family classification and music genre classification, the binary cross-entropy is used as the loss function and the weighted accuracy (WA, %) as the evaluation metric. During evaluation, all models receive 1-sec audio segments, and aggregate the predictions for each instance via averaging the per-segment predictions. We further note that all downstream classification experiments were repeated 5 times, and we report on their average scores.

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{garoufis2023multisourcecontrastive,
  title={Multi-Source Contrastive Learning from Musical Audio},
  author={Garoufis et al. (2023)},
  year={2023},
  note={arXiv:2302.07077}
}
```

- arXiv: 2302.07077