Papers › DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT

DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT

5 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.01900archive 2025-07-28

Heng-Jui Chang, Shu-wen Yang, Hung-Yi Lee

Self-supervised speech representation learning methods like wav2vec 2.0 and Hidden-unit BERT (HuBERT) leverage unlabeled speech data for pre-training and offer good representations for numerous speech processing tasks. Despite the success of these methods, they require large memory and high pre-training costs, making them inaccessible for researchers in academia and small companies. Therefore, this paper introduces DistilHuBERT, a novel multi-task learning framework to distill hidden representations from a HuBERT model directly. This method reduces HuBERT's size by 75% and 73% faster while retaining most performance in ten different tasks. Moreover, DistilHuBERT required little training time and data, opening the possibilities of pre-training personal and on-device SSL models for speech.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

s3prl/s3prl officialpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Multi-Task LearningRepresentation LearningSpeech Representation Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections