Speech-FT: A Fine-tuning Strategy for Enhancing Speech Representation Models Without Compromising Generalization Ability

Speech representation models are highly effective at extracting general features for various tasks. While fine-tuning can enhance these representations for specific applications, it often compromises their generalization ability. To address this challenge, we propose Speech-FT, a fine-tuning strategy for speech representation models that leverages model merging to preserve generalization ability while still benefiting from fine-tuning. Speech-FT is effective across different fine-tuning scenarios and is compatible with various types of speech representation models, providing a versatile solution. Speech-FT offers an efficient and practical approach to further improving general speech representations after pre-training.