Papers › k2SSL: A Faster and Better Framework for Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning
k2SSL: A Faster and Better Framework for Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning
Yifan Yang, Jianheng Zhuo, Zengrui Jin, Ziyang Ma, Xiaoyu Yang, Zengwei Yao, Liyong Guo, Wei Kang, Fangjun Kuang, Long Lin, Daniel Povey, Xie Chen
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved great success in speech-related tasks. While Transformer and Conformer architectures have dominated SSL backbones, encoders like Zipformer, which excel in automatic speech recognition (ASR), remain unexplored in SSL. Concurrently, inefficiencies in data processing within existing SSL training frameworks, such as fairseq, pose challenges in managing the growing volumes of training data. To address these issues, we propose k2SSL, an open-source framework that offers faster, more memory-efficient, and better-performing self-supervised speech representation learning, focusing on downstream ASR tasks. The optimized HuBERT and proposed Zipformer-based SSL systems exhibit substantial reductions in both training time and memory usage during SSL training. Experiments on LibriSpeech demonstrate that Zipformer Base significantly outperforms HuBERT and WavLM, achieving up to a 34.8% relative WER reduction compared to HuBERT Base after fine-tuning, along with a 3.5x pre-training speedup in GPU hours. When scaled to 60k hours of LibriLight data, Zipformer Large exhibits remarkable efficiency, matching HuBERT Large's performance while requiring only 5/8 pre-training steps.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
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