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.
@article{arxiv.2105.01051,
title = {SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark},
author = {Shu-wen Yang and Po-Han Chi and Yung-Sung Chuang and Cheng-I Jeff Lai and Kushal Lakhotia and Yist Y. Lin and Andy T. Liu and Jiatong Shi and Xuankai Chang and Guan-Ting Lin and Tzu-Hsien Huang and Wei-Cheng Tseng and Ko-tik Lee and Da-Rong Liu and Zili Huang and Shuyan Dong and Shang-Wen Li and Shinji Watanabe and Abdelrahman Mohamed and Hung-yi Lee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.01051},
year = {2021}
}