A Large-Scale Evaluation of Speech Foundation Models

The foundation model paradigm leverages a shared foundation model to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for various tasks, requiring minimal downstream-specific modeling and data annotation. This approach has proven crucial in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, the speech processing community lacks a similar setup to explore the paradigm systematically. In this work, we establish the Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark (SUPERB) to study the effectiveness of the paradigm for speech. We propose a unified multi-tasking framework to address speech processing tasks in SUPERB using a frozen foundation model followed by task-specialized, lightweight prediction heads. Combining our results with community submissions, we verify that the foundation model paradigm is promising for speech, and our multi-tasking framework is simple yet effective, as the best-performing foundation model shows competitive generalizability across most SUPERB tasks. For reproducibility and extensibility, we have developed a long-term maintained platform that enables deterministic benchmarking, allows for result sharing via an online leaderboard, and promotes collaboration through a community-driven benchmark database to support new development cycles. Finally, we conduct a series of analyses to offer an in-depth understanding of SUPERB and speech foundation models, including information flows across tasks inside the models, the correctness of the weighted-sum benchmarking protocol and the statistical significance and robustness of the benchmark.

Parallel Synthesis for Autoregressive Speech Generation

Autoregressive models have achieved outstanding performance in neural speech synthesis tasks. Though they can generate highly natural human speech, the iterative generation inevitably makes the synthesis time proportional to the utterance's length, leading to low efficiency. Many works were dedicated to generating the whole speech time sequence in parallel and then proposed GAN-based, flow-based, and score-based models. This paper proposed a new thought for the autoregressive generation. Instead of iteratively predicting samples in a time sequence, the proposed model performs frequency-wise autoregressive generation (FAR) and bit-wise autoregressive generation (BAR) to synthesize speech. In FAR, a speech utterance is first split into different frequency subbands. The proposed model generates a subband conditioned on the previously generated one. A full band speech can then be reconstructed by using these generated subbands and a synthesis filter bank. Similarly, in BAR, an 8-bit quantized signal is generated iteratively from the first bit. By redesigning the autoregressive method to compute in domains other than the time domain, the number of iterations in the proposed model is no longer proportional to the utterance's length but the number of subbands/bits. The inference efficiency is hence significantly increased. Besides, a post-filter is employed to sample audio signals from output posteriors, and its training objective is designed based on the characteristics of the proposed autoregressive methods. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to synthesize speech faster than real-time without GPU acceleration. Compared with the baseline autoregressive and non-autoregressive models, the proposed model achieves better MOS and shows its good generalization ability while synthesizing 44 kHz speech or utterances from unseen speakers.

SUPERB-SG: Enhanced Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark for Semantic and Generative Capabilities

Transfer learning has proven to be crucial in advancing the state of speech and natural language processing research in recent years. In speech, a model pre-trained by self-supervised learning transfers remarkably well on multiple tasks. However, the lack of a consistent evaluation methodology is limiting towards a holistic understanding of the efficacy of such models. SUPERB was a step towards introducing a common benchmark to evaluate pre-trained models across various speech tasks. In this paper, we introduce SUPERB-SG, a new benchmark focused on evaluating the semantic and generative capabilities of pre-trained models by increasing task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB. We use a lightweight methodology to test the robustness of representations learned by pre-trained models under shifts in data domain and quality across different types of tasks. It entails freezing pre-trained model parameters, only using simple task-specific trainable heads. The goal is to be inclusive of all researchers, and encourage efficient use of computational resources. We also show that the task diversity of SUPERB-SG coupled with limited task supervision is an effective recipe for evaluating the generalizability of model representation.

QaNER: Prompting Question Answering Models for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Recently, prompt-based learning for pre-trained language models has succeeded in few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) by exploiting prompts as task guidance to increase label efficiency. However, previous prompt-based methods for few-shot NER have limitations such as a higher computational complexity, poor zero-shot ability, requiring manual prompt engineering, or lack of prompt robustness. In this work, we address these shortcomings by proposing a new prompt-based learning NER method with Question Answering (QA), called QaNER. Our approach includes 1) a refined strategy for converting NER problems into the QA formulation; 2) NER prompt generation for QA models; 3) prompt-based tuning with QA models on a few annotated NER examples; 4) zero-shot NER by prompting the QA model. Comparing the proposed approach with previous methods, QaNER is faster at inference, insensitive to the prompt quality, and robust to hyper-parameters, as well as demonstrating significantly better low-resource performance and zero-shot capability.

Don't speak too fast: The impact of data bias on self-supervised speech models

Self-supervised Speech Models (S3Ms) have been proven successful in many speech downstream tasks, like ASR. However, how pre-training data affects S3Ms' downstream behavior remains an unexplored issue. In this paper, we study how pre-training data affects S3Ms by pre-training models on biased datasets targeting different factors of speech, including gender, content, and prosody, and evaluate these pre-trained S3Ms on selected downstream tasks in SUPERB Benchmark. Our experiments show that S3Ms have tolerance toward gender bias. Moreover, we find that the content of speech has little impact on the performance of S3Ms across downstream tasks, but S3Ms do show a preference toward a slower speech rate.

Improving the Adversarial Robustness for Speaker Verification by Self-Supervised Learning

Previous works have shown that automatic speaker verification (ASV) is seriously vulnerable to malicious spoofing attacks, such as replay, synthetic speech, and recently emerged adversarial attacks. Great efforts have been dedicated to defending ASV against replay and synthetic speech; however, only a few approaches have been explored to deal with adversarial attacks. All the existing approaches to tackle adversarial attacks for ASV require the knowledge for adversarial samples generation, but it is impractical for defenders to know the exact attack algorithms that are applied by the in-the-wild attackers. This work is among the first to perform adversarial defense for ASV without knowing the specific attack algorithms. Inspired by self-supervised learning models (SSLMs) that possess the merits of alleviating the superficial noise in the inputs and reconstructing clean samples from the interrupted ones, this work regards adversarial perturbations as one kind of noise and conducts adversarial defense for ASV by SSLMs. Specifically, we propose to perform adversarial defense from two perspectives: 1) adversarial perturbation purification and 2) adversarial perturbation detection. Experimental results show that our detection module effectively shields the ASV by detecting adversarial samples with an accuracy of around 80%. Moreover, since there is no common metric for evaluating the adversarial defense performance for ASV, this work also formalizes evaluation metrics for adversarial defense considering both purification and detection based approaches into account. We sincerely encourage future works to benchmark their approaches based on the proposed evaluation framework.

Adversarial Defense for Automatic Speaker Verification by Self-Supervised Learning

Previous works have shown that automatic speaker verification (ASV) is seriously vulnerable to malicious spoofing attacks, such as replay, synthetic speech, and recently emerged adversarial attacks. Great efforts have been dedicated to defending ASV against replay and synthetic speech; however, only a few approaches have been explored to deal with adversarial attacks. All the existing approaches to tackle adversarial attacks for ASV require the knowledge for adversarial samples generation, but it is impractical for defenders to know the exact attack algorithms that are applied by the in-the-wild attackers. This work is among the first to perform adversarial defense for ASV without knowing the specific attack algorithms. Inspired by self-supervised learning models (SSLMs) that possess the merits of alleviating the superficial noise in the inputs and reconstructing clean samples from the interrupted ones, this work regards adversarial perturbations as one kind of noise and conducts adversarial defense for ASV by SSLMs. Specifically, we propose to perform adversarial defense from two perspectives: 1) adversarial perturbation purification and 2) adversarial perturbation detection. Experimental results show that our detection module effectively shields the ASV by detecting adversarial samples with an accuracy of around 80%. Moreover, since there is no common metric for evaluating the adversarial defense performance for ASV, this work also formalizes evaluation metrics for adversarial defense considering both purification and detection based approaches into account. We sincerely encourage future works to benchmark their approaches based on the proposed evaluation framework.

SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has proven vital for advancing research in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). The paradigm pretrains a shared model on large volumes of unlabeled data and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) for various tasks with minimal adaptation. However, the speech processing community lacks a similar setup to systematically explore the paradigm. To bridge this gap, we introduce Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark (SUPERB). SUPERB is a leaderboard to benchmark the performance of a shared model across a wide range of speech processing tasks with minimal architecture changes and labeled data. Among multiple usages of the shared model, we especially focus on extracting the representation learned from SSL due to its preferable re-usability. We present a simple framework to solve SUPERB tasks by learning task-specialized lightweight prediction heads on top of the frozen shared model. Our results demonstrate that the framework is promising as SSL representations show competitive generalizability and accessibility across SUPERB tasks. We release SUPERB as a challenge with a leaderboard and a benchmark toolkit to fuel the research in representation learning and general speech processing.

Adversarial defense for automatic speaker verification by cascaded self-supervised learning models

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) is one of the core technologies in biometric identification. With the ubiquitous usage of ASV systems in safety-critical applications, more and more malicious attackers attempt to launch adversarial attacks at ASV systems. In the midst of the arms race between attack and defense in ASV, how to effectively improve the robustness of ASV against adversarial attacks remains an open question. We note that the self-supervised learning models possess the ability to mitigate superficial perturbations in the input after pretraining. Hence, with the goal of effective defense in ASV against adversarial attacks, we propose a standard and attack-agnostic method based on cascaded self-supervised learning models to purify the adversarial perturbations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves effective defense performance and can successfully counter adversarial attacks in scenarios where attackers may either be aware or unaware of the self-supervised learning models.

TERA: Self-Supervised Learning of Transformer Encoder Representation for Speech

We introduce a self-supervised speech pre-training method called TERA, which stands for Transformer Encoder Representations from Alteration. Recent approaches often learn through the formulation of a single auxiliary task like contrastive prediction, autoregressive prediction, or masked reconstruction. Unlike previous approaches, we use a multi-target auxiliary task to pre-train Transformer Encoders on a large amount of unlabeled speech. The model learns through the reconstruction of acoustic frames from its altered counterpart, where we use a stochastic policy to alter along three dimensions: temporal, channel, and magnitude. TERA can be used to extract speech representations or fine-tune with downstream models. We evaluate TERA on several downstream tasks, including phoneme classification, speaker recognition, and speech recognition. TERA achieved strong performance on these tasks by improving upon surface features and outperforming previous methods. In our experiments, we show that through alteration along different dimensions, the model learns to encode distinct aspects of speech. We explore different knowledge transfer methods to incorporate the pre-trained model with downstream models. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method can be easily transferred to another dataset not used in pre-training.