Investigating the Emergent Audio Classification Ability of ASR Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ma, Rao, Liusie, Adian, Gales, Mark J. F., Knill, Kate M.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Ma, Rao
Liusie, Adian
Gales, Mark J. F.
Knill, Kate M.
author_facet Ma, Rao
Liusie, Adian
Gales, Mark J. F.
Knill, Kate M.
contents Text and vision foundation models can perform many tasks in a zero-shot setting, a desirable property that enables these systems to be applied in general and low-resource settings. There has been far less work, however, on the zero-shot abilities of ASR foundation models, with these systems typically fine-tuned to specific tasks or constrained to applications that match their training criterion and data annotation. In this work we investigate the ability of Whisper and MMS, ASR foundation models trained primarily for speech recognition, to perform zero-shot audio classification. We use simple template-based text prompts at the decoder and use the resulting decoding probabilities to generate zero-shot predictions. Without training the model on extra data or adding any new parameters, we demonstrate that Whisper shows promising zero-shot classification performance on a range of 8 audio-classification datasets, outperforming the accuracy of existing state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines by an average of 9%. One important step to unlock the emergent ability is debiasing, where a simple unsupervised reweighting method of the class probabilities yields consistent significant performance gains. We further show that performance increases with model size, implying that as ASR foundation models scale up, they may exhibit improved zero-shot performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_09363
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating the Emergent Audio Classification Ability of ASR Foundation Models
Ma, Rao
Liusie, Adian
Gales, Mark J. F.
Knill, Kate M.
Computation and Language
Text and vision foundation models can perform many tasks in a zero-shot setting, a desirable property that enables these systems to be applied in general and low-resource settings. There has been far less work, however, on the zero-shot abilities of ASR foundation models, with these systems typically fine-tuned to specific tasks or constrained to applications that match their training criterion and data annotation. In this work we investigate the ability of Whisper and MMS, ASR foundation models trained primarily for speech recognition, to perform zero-shot audio classification. We use simple template-based text prompts at the decoder and use the resulting decoding probabilities to generate zero-shot predictions. Without training the model on extra data or adding any new parameters, we demonstrate that Whisper shows promising zero-shot classification performance on a range of 8 audio-classification datasets, outperforming the accuracy of existing state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines by an average of 9%. One important step to unlock the emergent ability is debiasing, where a simple unsupervised reweighting method of the class probabilities yields consistent significant performance gains. We further show that performance increases with model size, implying that as ASR foundation models scale up, they may exhibit improved zero-shot performance.
title Investigating the Emergent Audio Classification Ability of ASR Foundation Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09363