arxivcs.LGcs.AI2026-07-24
Phylogenetic signal in marine mammal and bird vocalizations captured by audio foundation models: the limited benefit of domain-specific pretraining
Do learned audio embeddings encode structure that nobody told them to encode? We probe four large pretrained audio models (AST, CLAP, BEATs-bio and BirdNET) with a downstream task none of them saw during training: recovering phylogenetic distance from species vocalizations. If th…