Decoding what bioacoustic audio embeddings actually encode via speech features

arXiv·low signal

This paper (arXiv 2606.14662, cs.LG/cs.SD) probes pretrained audio embeddings — standard in bioacoustics — to reveal which acoustic/speech features they actually capture, going beyond raw task performance. The transferable lesson for practitioners is methodological: a recipe for interrogating what a black-box audio encoder has learned, rather than trusting downstream accuracy alone.