No Arabic abstract
Predicting the altered acoustic frames is an effective way of self-supervised learning for speech representation. However, it is challenging to prevent the pretrained model from overfitting. In this paper, we proposed to introduce two dropout regularization methods into the pretraining of transformer encoder: (1) attention dropout, (2) layer dropout. Both of the two dropout methods encourage the model to utilize global speech information, and avoid just copying local spectrum features when reconstructing the masked frames. We evaluated the proposed methods on phoneme classification and speaker recognition tasks. The experiments demonstrate that our dropout approaches achieve competitive results, and improve the performance of classification accuracy on downstream tasks.
Supervised learning for single-channel speech enhancement requires carefully labeled training examples where the noisy mixture is input into the network and the network is trained to produce an output close to the ideal target. To relax the conditions on the training data, we consider the task of training speech enhancement networks in a self-supervised manner. We first use a limited training set of clean speech sounds and learn a latent representation by autoencoding on their magnitude spectrograms. We then autoencode on speech mixtures recorded in noisy environments and train the resulting autoencoder to share a latent representation with the clean examples. We show that using this training schema, we can now map noisy speech to its clean version using a network that is autonomously trainable without requiring labeled training examples or human intervention.
Code-switching (CS) occurs when a speaker alternates words of two or more languages within a single sentence or across sentences. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) of CS speech has to deal with two or more languages at the same time. In this study, we propose a Transformer-based architecture with two symmetric language-specific encoders to capture the individual language attributes, that improve the acoustic representation of each language. These representations are combined using a language-specific multi-head attention mechanism in the decoder module. Each encoder and its corresponding attention module in the decoder are pre-trained using a large monolingual corpus aiming to alleviate the impact of limited CS training data. We call such a network a multi-encoder-decoder (MED) architecture. Experiments on the SEAME corpus show that the proposed MED architecture achieves 10.2% and 10.8% relative error rate reduction on the CS evaluation sets with Mandarin and English as the matrix language respectively.
In this paper, we propose an iterative framework for self-supervised speaker representation learning based on a deep neural network (DNN). The framework starts with training a self-supervision speaker embedding network by maximizing agreement between different segments within an utterance via a contrastive loss. Taking advantage of DNNs ability to learn from data with label noise, we propose to cluster the speaker embedding obtained from the previous speaker network and use the subsequent class assignments as pseudo labels to train a new DNN. Moreover, we iteratively train the speaker network with pseudo labels generated from the previous step to bootstrap the discriminative power of a DNN. Speaker verification experiments are conducted on the VoxCeleb dataset. The results show that our proposed iterative self-supervised learning framework outperformed previous works using self-supervision. The speaker network after 5 iterations obtains a 61% performance gain over the speaker embedding model trained with contrastive loss.
Wav2vec-C introduces a novel representation learning technique combining elements from wav2vec 2.0 and VQ-VAE. Our model learns to reproduce quantized representations from partially masked speech encoding using a contrastive loss in a way similar to Wav2vec 2.0. However, the quantization process is regularized by an additional consistency network that learns to reconstruct the input features to the wav2vec 2.0 network from the quantized representations in a way similar to a VQ-VAE model. The proposed self-supervised model is trained on 10k hours of unlabeled data and subsequently used as the speech encoder in a RNN-T ASR model and fine-tuned with 1k hours of labeled data. This work is one of only a few studies of self-supervised learning on speech tasks with a large volume of real far-field labeled data. The Wav2vec-C encoded representations achieves, on average, twice the error reduction over baseline and a higher codebook utilization in comparison to wav2vec 2.0
Through solving pretext tasks, self-supervised learning leverages unlabeled data to extract useful latent representations replacing traditional input features in the downstream task. In various application domains, including computer vision, natural language processing and audio/speech signal processing, a wide range of features where engineered through decades of research efforts. As it turns out, learning to predict such features has proven to be a particularly relevant pretext task leading to building useful self-supervised representations that prove to be effective for downstream tasks. However, methods and common practices for combining such pretext tasks, where each task targets a different group of features for better performance on the downstream task have not been explored and understood properly. In fact, the process relies almost exclusively on a computationally heavy experimental procedure, which becomes intractable with the increase of the number of pretext tasks. This paper introduces a method to select a group of pretext tasks among a set of candidates. The method we propose estimates properly calibrated weights for the partial losses corresponding to the considered pretext tasks during the self-supervised training process. The experiments conducted on speaker recognition and automatic speech recognition validate our approach, as the groups selected and weighted with our method perform better than classic baselines, thus facilitating the selection and combination of relevant pseudo-labels for self-supervised representation learning.