Pavan Seshadri

I'm a second-year masters student at Georgia Tech advised by Dr. Alexander Lerch in the Music Informatics Group.

I am broadly interested in topics spanning speech/audio/music and language representation learning, including information retrieval, recommendation systems, and multimodal learning, especially for systems that facilitate artistic creativity or discovery.

My current work has centered around topics in music information retrieval (MIR), soundscape detection, and music recommender systems.

Prior to starting graduate school, I was a Machine Learning Engineer at Amazon where I worked on NLP research and infrastructure for product classification.

I recieved my bachelors degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2021, with a minor in Music Technology. My undergraduate research focused on representation learning methods for music performance assessment.

Starting May 2024, I will be joining Music.ai as a research intern, working with Dr. Filip Korzeniowski and Dr. Richard Vogl.

I will be available and looking for full-time roles starting December 2024.

Email  /  CV  /  Linkedin  /  Github  /  Google Scholar

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Selected Conference Publications
Enhancing Sequential Music Recommendation with Feedback-Informed Contrastive Learning
Pavan Seshadri, Shahrzad Shashaani, Peter Knees
Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Bari, Italy, RecSys 2024
arXiv / code (Coming soon)

We propose a contrastive learning task to model temporal negative feedback within the objective function of a sequential music recommender, and demonstrate performance gains over feedback-agnostic systems.

ASPED: An Audio Dataset for Detecting Pedestrians
Pavan Seshadri, Chaeyeon Han, Bon-Woo Koo, Noah Posner, Subhrajit Guhathakurta, Alexander Lerch
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing,Seoul, South Korea, ICASSP 2024
arXiv / code / dataset

We introduce the new audio analysis task of pedestrian detection and present a new large-scale dataset for this task. While the preliminary results prove the viability of using audio approaches for pedestrian detection, they also show that this challenging task cannot be easily solved with standard approaches.

Improving Music Performance Assessment with Contrastive Learning
Pavan Seshadri, Alexander Lerch
Proceedings of the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval, Online, ISMIR 2021
arXiv / code

Contrastive loss based neural networks are able to exceed SoTA performance for music performance assessment (MPA) regression tasks by learning a better clustered latent space.

Workshop Papers & Extended Abstracts
Leveraging Negative Signals with Self-Attention for Sequential Music Recommendation
Pavan Seshadri, Peter Knees
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Music Recommender Systems, 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Singapore, MuRS @ RecSys 2023   (Oral Presentation)
arXiv / code

We present a study using self-attentive architectures for next-track sequential music recommendation. We additionally propose a contrastive learning subtask to learn session-level track preference from implicit user signals, resulting in a 3-9% top-K hit rate performance increase relative to baseline negative feedback-agnostic approaches.

AVASPEECH-SMAD: A Strongly Labelled Speech and Music Activity Detection Dataset with Label Co-occurrence
Yun-Ning Hung, Karn N. Watcharasupat, Chih-Wei Wu, Iroro Orife, Kelian Li, Pavan Seshadri, Junyoung Lee
Late-Breaking Demos of the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval, ISMIR 2021 LBD
arXiv / code

We propose a dataset, AVASpeech-SMAD, which provides frame-level music labels for the existing AVASpeech dataset, originally consisting of 45 hours of audio and speech activity labels.

Experience
Music.ai
Research Science Intern, Music Information Retrieval (2024-Present)
Mentors: Filip Korzeniowski & Richard Vogl
Amazon
Software Development Engineer, Product Knowledge Classification (2021-2022)

Software Development Engineer Intern, Browse Auto Classification (2020)
Education
Georgia Institute of Technology
Masters of Science, Music Technology (2022-2024)
Bachelors of Science, Computer Science, Minor in Music Technology (2017-2021)
Advisor: Prof. Alexander Lerch

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