2021/09/30 by Arjit Jain, Jain, Arjit, Pranay Reddy Samala +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.00046
openalex publication_date 2021/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Time masking has become a de facto augmentation technique for speech and audio tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio classification, most notably as a part of SpecAugment. In this work, we propose SpliceOut, a simple modification to time masking which makes it computationally more efficient. SpliceOut performs comparably to (and sometimes outperforms) SpecAugment on a wide variety of speech and audio tasks, including ASR for seven different languages using varying amounts of training data, as well as on speech translation, sound and music classification, thus establishing itself as a broadly applicable audio augmentation method. SpliceOut also provides additional gains when used in conjunction with other augmentation techniques. Apart from the fully-supervised setting, we also demonstrate that SpliceOut can complement unsupervised representation learning with performance gains in the semi-supervised and self-supervised settings.