OpenBEATs: A Fully Open-Source General-Purpose Audio Encoder

Shikhar Bharadwaj, Samuele Cornell, Kwanghee Choi, Satoru Fukayama, Hye-jin Shim, Soham Deshmukh, Shinji Watanabe

OpenBEATs: A Fully Open-Source General-Purpose Audio Encoder: 13 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #7 of 11 papers on 2025-07-21. Day-by-day upvote history.

Masked token prediction has emerged as a powerful pre-training objective across language, vision, and speech, offering the potential to unify these diverse modalities through a single pre-training task. However, its application for general audio understanding remains underexplored, with BEATs being the only notable example. BEATs has seen limited modifications due to the absence of open-source pre-training code. Furthermore, BEATs was trained only on AudioSet, restricting its broader downstream applicability. To address these gaps, we present OpenBEATs, an open-source framework that extends BEATs via multi-domain audio pre-training. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across six types of tasks, twenty five datasets, and three audio domains, including audio reasoning tasks such as audio question answering, entailment, and captioning. OpenBEATs achieves state-of-the-art performance on six bioacoustics datasets, two environmental sound datasets and five reasoning datasets, performing better than models exceeding a billion parameters at one-fourth their parameter size. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-domain datasets and masked token prediction task to learn general-purpose audio representations. To promote further research and reproducibility, we release all pre-training and evaluation code, pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints, and training logs at https://shikhar-s.github.io/OpenBEATs

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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