Low-Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification with Device Information in the DCASE 2025 Challenge

Abstract: This paper presents the Low-Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification with Device Information Task of the DCASE 2025 Challenge and its baseline system. Continuing the focus on low-complexity models, data efficiency, and device mismatch from previous editions (2022--2024), this year's task introduces a key change: recording device information is now provided at inference time. This enables the development of device-specific models that leverage device characteristics -- reflecting real-world deployment scenarios in which a model is designed with awareness of the underlying hardware. The training set matches the 25% subset used in the corresponding DCASE 2024 challenge, with no restrictions on external data use, highlighting transfer learning as a central topic. The baseline achieves 50.72% accuracy on this ten-class problem with a device-general model, improving to 51.89% when using the available device information.