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Phylogenetic signal in marine mammal and bird vocalizations captured by audio foundation models: the limited benefit of domain-specific pretraining

Research Bioacoustics AI

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TL;DR - General-purpose audio foundation models encode strong phylogenetic signals in marine mammal and bird vocalizations, substantially outperforming handcrafted features. Domain-specific bioacoustic pretraining provided limited additional benefit.

  • CLAP and BEATs-bio achieved Mantel correlations of 0.82 among 26 cetaceans, while MFCC features showed no significant signal.
  • The cetacean result persisted after dimensionality reduction and controlling for dominant frequency.
  • AST and CLAP also recovered phylogenetic structure across 20 bird species, with correlations of 0.55 and 0.52.
  • BirdNET and BEATs-bio did not outperform general-purpose models on birds, each reaching only about 0.32–0.36.

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Phylogenetic signal in marine mammal and bird vocalizations captured by audio foundation models: the limited benefit of domain-specific pretraining

arXiv cs.LG VĂ­ctor RincĂłn Yepes 2026-07-24 arXiv:2607.22458
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-18 14:34:44.675474 UTC

TL;DR - General-purpose audio foundation models encode strong phylogenetic signals in marine mammal and bird vocalizations, substantially outperforming handcrafted features. Domain-specific bioacoustic pretraining provided limited additional benefit.

  • CLAP and BEATs-bio achieved Mantel correlations of 0.82 among 26 cetaceans, while MFCC features showed no significant signal.
  • The cetacean result persisted after dimensionality reduction and controlling for dominant frequency.
  • AST and CLAP also recovered phylogenetic structure across 20 bird species, with correlations of 0.55 and 0.52.
  • BirdNET and BEATs-bio did not outperform general-purpose models on birds, each reaching only about 0.32–0.36.
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