File size: 4,196 Bytes
19313bd
e493974
 
 
 
56843d8
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
19313bd
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
0db24f3
26c6e42
0db24f3
 
19313bd
 
 
 
 
73241e4
 
0db24f3
 
 
 
2fb6fd2
73241e4
0db24f3
1aca5a3
0db24f3
2fb6fd2
0db24f3
73241e4
0db24f3
 
 
 
 
73241e4
0db24f3
73241e4
0db24f3
73241e4
 
 
0db24f3
 
 
 
2fb6fd2
2de9295
56843d8
0db24f3
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
56843d8
 
0db24f3
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
56843d8
 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
---
license: cc-by-4.0
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
pretty_name: VocSim
tags:
- audio
- audio-similarity
- zero-shot-learning
- representation-learning
- embedding-evaluation
- unsupervised-learning
- speech
- environmental-sounds
- animal-vocalizations
- benchmark
paperswithcode_id: audiosim
dataset_info:
  features:
  - name: audio
    dtype:
      audio:
        sampling_rate: 16000
  - name: subset
    dtype: string
  - name: speaker
    dtype: string
  - name: label
    dtype: string
  splits:
  - name: train
    num_bytes: 5452179735
    num_examples: 114641
  download_size: 5500616162
  dataset_size: 5452179735
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: data/train-*
---

# VocSim — Public Benchmark

[![GitHub](https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-vocsim%2Fbenchmark-black?logo=github)](https://github.com/vocsim/benchmark)
[![Leaderboard](https://img.shields.io/badge/%F0%9F%A4%97%20Leaderboard-vocsim%2FVocSim-green)](https://huggingface.co/spaces/vocsim/VocSim)
[![License: CC BY 4.0](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-CC%20BY%204.0-blue.svg)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

The public split of **VocSim**, a training-free benchmark for zero-shot content identity in single-source audio embeddings. VocSim probes the intrinsic geometric quality of frozen audio representations: do acoustically variable instances of the same content land near each other in embedding space, without any task-specific training?

> Basha, M., Zai, A. T., Stoll, S., & Hahnloser, R. H. R. *VocSim: A Training-free Benchmark for Zero-shot Content Identity in Single-source Audio.* ICML 2026. [arXiv:2512.10120](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.10120)

## What's here

- **114,641 clips** across **15 public subsets**, drawn from 19 source corpora.
- Domains: human speech (phones, words, utterances), animal vocalizations (birdsong, otter calls), environmental sounds.
- Conditions: clean to noisy, sub-100ms to multi-second, few to thousands of classes per subset.
- All audio standardized to **16 kHz mono**.
- Single-source only — no overlapping speakers or simultaneous sources — so evaluation isolates content representation from source separation.

Four additional **blind out-of-distribution subsets** (low-resource speech in Shipibo-Conibo and Chintang) are held out for server-side evaluation via the [leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/vocsim/VocSim).

## Schema

```python
{
  "audio":  {"array": np.ndarray, "sampling_rate": 16000},
  "subset": "HW1",        # source-corpus tag (see paper for the full list)
  "speaker": "spk_042",   # speaker / animal / source ID, or "N/A"
  "label":  "hello",      # ground-truth class for similarity
}
```

## Quick start

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("vocsim/public", split="train")
print(ds[0])
```

For end-to-end evaluation (feature extraction, distance computation, P@k / GSR), use the reference pipeline at [github.com/vocsim/benchmark](https://github.com/vocsim/benchmark).

## Companion datasets

| Dataset | Purpose |
|---|---|
| [`vocsim/avian-perception-benchmark`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/vocsim/avian-perception-benchmark) | Alignment of embeddings with zebra-finch perceptual judgments |
| [`vocsim/mouse-strain-classification-benchmark`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/vocsim/mouse-strain-classification-benchmark) | C57 vs DBA USV classification |
| [`vocsim/mouse-identity-classification-benchmark`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/vocsim/mouse-identity-classification-benchmark) | Individual-mouse identification from USVs |

## Licensing

Aggregation and metadata are released under CC BY 4.0. Each source corpus retains its original license; see Appendix A.1.1 of the paper for a per-source breakdown.

## Citation

```bibtex
@inproceedings{basha2026vocsim,
  title     = {VocSim: A Training-free Benchmark for Zero-shot Content Identity in Single-source Audio},
  author    = {Basha, Maris and Zai, Anja T. and Stoll, Sabine and Hahnloser, Richard H. R.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.48550/arXiv.2512.10120}
}
```