Correlation of Fr\'echet Audio Distance With Human Perception of Environmental Audio Is Embedding Dependant
<|reference_start|>Correlation of Fr\'echet Audio Distance With Human Perception of Environmental Audio Is Embedding Dependant: This paper explores whether considering alternative domain-specific embeddings to calculate the Fr\'echet Audio Distance (FAD) metric can help the FAD to correlate better with perceptual ratings of environmental sounds. We used embeddings from VGGish, PANNs, MS-CLAP, L-CLAP, and MERT, which are tailored for either music or environmental sound evaluation. The FAD scores were calculated for sounds from the DCASE 2023 Task 7 dataset. Using perceptual data from the same task, we find that PANNs-WGM-LogMel produces the best correlation between FAD scores and perceptual ratings of both audio quality and perceived fit with a Spearman correlation higher than 0.5. We also find that music-specific embeddings resulted in significantly lower results. Interestingly, VGGish, the embedding used for the original Fr\'echet calculation, yielded a correlation below 0.1. These results underscore the critical importance of the choice of embedding for the FAD metric design.<|reference_end|>
@article{tailleur2024correlation,
    title={Correlation of Fr\'echet Audio Distance With Human Perception of
  Environmental Audio Is Embedding Dependant},
    author={Modan Tailleur and Junwon Lee and Mathieu Lagrange and Keunwoo Choi
  and Laurie M. Heller and Keisuke Imoto and Yuki Okamoto},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.17508},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.17508},
    primaryClass={cs.SD eess.AS}
}