  The advent of hyper-scale and general-purpose pre-trained models is shifting
the paradigm of building task-specific models for target tasks. In the field of
audio research, task-agnostic pre-trained models with high transferability and
adaptability have achieved state-of-the-art performances through fine-tuning
for downstream tasks. Nevertheless, re-training all the parameters of these
massive models entails an enormous amount of time and cost, along with a huge
carbon footprint. To overcome these limitations, the present study explores and
applies efficient transfer learning methods in the audio domain. We also
propose an integrated parameter-efficient tuning (IPET) framework by
aggregating the embedding prompt (a prompt-based learning approach), and the
adapter (an effective transfer learning method). We demonstrate the efficacy of
the proposed framework using two backbone pre-trained audio models with
different characteristics: the audio spectrogram transformer and wav2vec 2.0.
The proposed IPET framework exhibits remarkable performance compared to
fine-tuning method with fewer trainable parameters in four downstream tasks:
sound event classification, music genre classification, keyword spotting, and
speaker verification. Furthermore, the authors identify and analyze the
shortcomings of the IPET framework, providing lessons and research directions
for parameter efficient tuning in the audio domain.
