Abstract: To address the issues of severe interference of equipment operating noise and information loss caused by single extraction methods during coal gangue audio feature extraction, a coal gangue audio classification method based on improved EfficientNet is proposed. The method adopted a feature extraction approach combining Mel spectrogram and Gammatone frequency cepstral coefficients to effectively capture low-frequency information and detailed features in gangue audio. EfficientNet-B0 was selected as the backbone network, and the following improvements were made: the original multi-scale channel attention module was replaced with a convolutional block attention module, resulting in the Convolutional Attention Feature Fusion (CAFF) module. This module allowed the network to autonomously assign different weight information to features in different spatial positions, generating new effective features. Additionally, a Frequency-domain Channel Attention (FCA) module was embedded in parallel within the original MBConv module, strengthening the representation ability of feature maps and thereby improving overall network performance. The experimental results demonstrated that after introducing the CAFF module, the model's accuracy improved by 0.61%, the F₁ score increased by 0.52%, and convergence was faster, indicating that the CAFF module effectively enhanced the model's ability to capture spectral features. After integrating the FCA module, accuracy improved by 0.45%, and the F₁ score increased by 0.62%, showing that combining these modules further enhanced the model's generalization ability and its ability to process complex features. The improved EfficientNet model achieved an accuracy of 91.90%, with a standard deviation of 0.108, significantly outperforming other comparable audio classification models.