{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/pushing-the-limits-of-unsupervised-unit","title":"Pushing the Limits of Unsupervised Unit Discovery for SSL Speech Representation","arxiv_id":"2306.08920","date":"2023-06-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ziyang Ma","Zhisheng Zheng","Guanrou Yang","Yu Wang","Chao Zhang","Xie Chen"],"abstract":"The excellent generalization ability of self-supervised learning (SSL) for speech foundation models has garnered significant attention. HuBERT is a successful example that utilizes offline clustering to convert speech features into discrete units for a masked language modeling pretext task. However, simply clustering features as targets by k-means does not fully inspire the model's performance. In this work, we present an unsupervised method to improve SSL targets. Two models are proposed, MonoBERT and PolyBERT, which leverage context-independent and context-dependent phoneme-based units for pre-training. Our models outperform other SSL models significantly on the LibriSpeech benchmark without the need for iterative re-clustering and re-training. Furthermore, our models equipped with context-dependent units even outperform target-improvement models that use labeled data during pre-training. How we progressively improve the unit discovery process is demonstrated through experiments.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08920v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.08920v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"pushing-the-limits-of-unsupervised-unit","repo_url":"https://github.com/yanghaha0908/fasthubert","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition-2","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"masked-language-modeling","task_name":"Masked Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}