How Far Do Foundation Models Transfer to Infant Signals? A Cross-Dataset Transfer Audit with a Unified Need Ontology

Abstract

Public infant cry corpora are small, label-incompatible, and almost always evaluated one corpus at a time. We ask what this practice hides and what fixes it. Across four cry corpora screened by a multi-level leakage audit (byte-level and embedding-level deduplication plus a within-corpus train-test near-duplicate audit), we probe four frozen encoders and a handcrafted baseline under a unified five-class need ontology and shared task formulations. The audit exposes what single-corpus evaluation conceals: within-domain macro-F1 swings by 0.57-0.80 for the same encoder, cross-corpus transfer is negative on average (negative-transfer ratio 0.19-0.35, significant in 18 of 30 directed cells, BH-FDR), and 349 content-identical clip groups carry conflicting metadata labels across corpus distributions. The same audit, however, reveals a consistent way forward. Transfer into the noisiest corpus is consistently positive in effect size at matched training size and after near-duplicate removal, offering a practical recipe for small, noisy corpora. Frozen probes saturate at modest label budgets, while stabilized fine-tuning wins with full labels; domain-adaptive pretraining significantly beats stabilized fine-tuning at 5-10-shot (the 1-shot advantage is not robust to optimization-seed variance) but shows no significant advantage at 50-shot or beyond. In the tested binary, shared-label settings, ontology-mapped joint training wins in all four encoder-by-target combinations, whereas naively merging unmapped labels costs up to 37 F1 points. We release the ontology, mapping code, and audit pipeline, turning incompatible cry corpora into a usable joint-training resource.