Soundscape studies typically attempt to capture the perception and understanding of sonic environments by surveying users. However, for long-term monitoring or assessing interventions, sound-signal-based approaches are required. To this end, most previous research focused on psycho-acoustic quantities or automatic sound recognition. Few attempts were made to include appraisal (e.g., in circumplex frameworks). This paper proposes an artificial intelligence (AI)-based dual-branch convolutional neural network with cross-attention-based fusion (DCNN-CaF) to analyze automatic soundscape characterization, including sound recognition and appraisal. Using the DeLTA dataset containing human-annotated sound source labels and perceived annoyance, the DCNN-CaF is proposed to perform sound source classification (SSC) and human-perceived annoyance rating prediction (ARP). Experimental findings indicate that (1) the proposed DCNN-CaF using loudness and Mel features outperforms the DCNN-CaF using only one of them. (2) The proposed DCNN-CaF with cross-attention fusion outperforms other typical AI-based models and soundscape-related traditional machine learning methods on the SSC and ARP tasks. (3) Correlation analysis reveals that the relationship between sound sources and annoyance is similar for humans and the proposed AI-based DCNN-CaF model. (4) Generalization tests show that the proposed model's ARP in the presence of model-unknown sound sources is consistent with expert expectations and can explain previous findings from the literature on sound-scape augmentation.

Deep learning-based semiconductor defect inspection has gained traction in recent years, offering a powerful and versatile approach that provides high accuracy, adaptability, and efficiency in detecting and classifying nano-scale defects. However, semiconductor manufacturing processes are continually evolving, leading to the emergence of new types of defects over time. This presents a significant challenge for conventional supervised defect detectors, as they may suffer from catastrophic forgetting when trained on new defect datasets, potentially compromising performance on previously learned tasks. An alternative approach involves the constant storage of previously trained datasets alongside pre-trained model versions, which can be utilized for (re-)training from scratch or fine-tuning whenever encountering a new defect dataset. However, adhering to such a storage template is impractical in terms of size, particularly when considering High-Volume Manufacturing (HVM). Additionally, semiconductor defect datasets, especially those encompassing stochastic defects, are often limited and expensive to obtain, thus lacking sufficient representation of the entire universal set of defectivity. This work introduces a task-agnostic, meta-learning approach aimed at addressing this challenge, which enables the incremental addition of new defect classes and scales to create a more robust and generalized model for semiconductor defect inspection. We have benchmarked our approach using real resist-wafer SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) datasets for two process steps, ADI and AEI, demonstrating its superior performance compared to conventional supervised training methods.