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Hauptverfasser: Yuksel, Goksenin, Guetschel, Pierre, Tangermann, Michael, van Gerven, Marcel, van der Heijden, Kiki
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23238
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author Yuksel, Goksenin
Guetschel, Pierre
Tangermann, Michael
van Gerven, Marcel
van der Heijden, Kiki
author_facet Yuksel, Goksenin
Guetschel, Pierre
Tangermann, Michael
van Gerven, Marcel
van der Heijden, Kiki
contents Learning audio representations from raw waveforms overcomes key limitations of spectrogram-based audio representation learning, such as the long latency of spectrogram computation and the loss of phase information. Yet, while self-supervised speech representation learning from raw waveforms has been remarkably successful, these approaches have not achieved similar feats for general-purpose audio representation learning from waveforms. Here, we propose WavJEPA, a waveform-based version of the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture. WavJEPA leverages high-level semantic representation learning to tackle the shortcomings of representation learning at the speech unit or token level. We show that this approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art time-domain audio foundation models across a wide variety of downstream benchmark tasks, while requiring considerably fewer computational resources. Additionally, to overcome the performance drop that time-domain models typically exhibit in noisy and reverberant real-world acoustic environments, we present WavJEPA-Nat. WavJEPA-Nat is a multi-channel extension of the WavJEPA architecture trained on simulated naturalistic scenes. We find that WavJEPA-Nat is highly robust to reverberation and noise. These results highlight the feasibility and computational efficiency of general-purpose audio representation learning from raw waveforms, showcasing the potential for low-latency, robust time-domain audio foundation models for real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23238
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WavJEPA: Semantic learning unlocks robust audio foundation models for raw waveforms
Yuksel, Goksenin
Guetschel, Pierre
Tangermann, Michael
van Gerven, Marcel
van der Heijden, Kiki
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Learning audio representations from raw waveforms overcomes key limitations of spectrogram-based audio representation learning, such as the long latency of spectrogram computation and the loss of phase information. Yet, while self-supervised speech representation learning from raw waveforms has been remarkably successful, these approaches have not achieved similar feats for general-purpose audio representation learning from waveforms. Here, we propose WavJEPA, a waveform-based version of the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture. WavJEPA leverages high-level semantic representation learning to tackle the shortcomings of representation learning at the speech unit or token level. We show that this approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art time-domain audio foundation models across a wide variety of downstream benchmark tasks, while requiring considerably fewer computational resources. Additionally, to overcome the performance drop that time-domain models typically exhibit in noisy and reverberant real-world acoustic environments, we present WavJEPA-Nat. WavJEPA-Nat is a multi-channel extension of the WavJEPA architecture trained on simulated naturalistic scenes. We find that WavJEPA-Nat is highly robust to reverberation and noise. These results highlight the feasibility and computational efficiency of general-purpose audio representation learning from raw waveforms, showcasing the potential for low-latency, robust time-domain audio foundation models for real-world applications.
title WavJEPA: Semantic learning unlocks robust audio foundation models for raw waveforms
topic Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23238