EnCodecMAE: Leveraging neural codecs for universal audio representation learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pepino, Leonardo, Riera, Pablo, Ferrer, Luciana
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Pepino, Leonardo
Riera, Pablo
Ferrer, Luciana
author_facet Pepino, Leonardo
Riera, Pablo
Ferrer, Luciana
contents The goal of universal audio representation learning is to obtain foundational models that can be used for a variety of downstream tasks involving speech, music and environmental sounds. To approach this problem, methods inspired by works on self-supervised learning for NLP, like BERT, or computer vision, like masked autoencoders (MAE), are often adapted to the audio domain. In this work, we propose masking representations of the audio signal, and training a MAE to reconstruct the masked segments. The reconstruction is done by predicting the discrete units generated by EnCodec, a neural audio codec, from the unmasked inputs. We evaluate this approach, which we call EnCodecMAE, on a wide range of tasks involving speech, music and environmental sounds. Our best model outperforms various state-of-the-art audio representation models in terms of global performance. Additionally, we evaluate the resulting representations in the challenging task of automatic speech recognition (ASR), obtaining decent results and paving the way for a universal audio representation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_07391
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EnCodecMAE: Leveraging neural codecs for universal audio representation learning
Pepino, Leonardo
Riera, Pablo
Ferrer, Luciana
Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
The goal of universal audio representation learning is to obtain foundational models that can be used for a variety of downstream tasks involving speech, music and environmental sounds. To approach this problem, methods inspired by works on self-supervised learning for NLP, like BERT, or computer vision, like masked autoencoders (MAE), are often adapted to the audio domain. In this work, we propose masking representations of the audio signal, and training a MAE to reconstruct the masked segments. The reconstruction is done by predicting the discrete units generated by EnCodec, a neural audio codec, from the unmasked inputs. We evaluate this approach, which we call EnCodecMAE, on a wide range of tasks involving speech, music and environmental sounds. Our best model outperforms various state-of-the-art audio representation models in terms of global performance. Additionally, we evaluate the resulting representations in the challenging task of automatic speech recognition (ASR), obtaining decent results and paving the way for a universal audio representation.
title EnCodecMAE: Leveraging neural codecs for universal audio representation learning
topic Sound
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07391