2024/08/23 by Huang, He, Park, Taejin, Dhawan, Kunal +6 · 2 citations
#Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.13106
Self-supervised learning has been proved to benefit a wide range of speech processing tasks, such as speech recognition/translation, speaker verification and diarization, etc. However, most of current approaches are computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a simplified and more efficient self-supervised learning framework termed as NeMo Encoder for Speech Tasks (NEST). Specifically, we adopt the FastConformer architecture with 8x sub-sampling rate, which is faster than Transformer or Conformer architectures. Instead of clustering-based quantization, we use fixed random projection for its simplicity and effectiveness. We also implement a generalized noisy speech augmentation that teaches the model to disentangle the main speaker from noise or other speakers. Experiments show that \model improves over existing self-supervised models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on a variety of speech processing tasks, such as speech recognition/translation, speaker diarization, spoken language understanding, etc. Code and checkpoints are publicly available via NVIDIA NeMo framework.