# Learning Problem-agnostic Speech Representations from Multiple Self-supervised Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03416 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03416/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01192/) (2021)
- [Layer-wise Analysis of a Self-supervised Speech Representation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04734/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [SSAST: Self-Supervised Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09784/) (2021)
- [Robust wav2vec 2.0: Analyzing Domain Shift in Self-Supervised Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01027/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning: Introduction, Advances and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09327/) (2021)
- [DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01900/) (2021)
- [Visual Speech Recognition for Multiple Languages in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13084/) (2022)
- [A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11717/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning of Musical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09410/) (2021)
- [Neural Analysis and Synthesis: Reconstructing Speech from Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14513/) (2021)
- [HEAR: Holistic Evaluation of Audio Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03022/) (2022)
- [UniSpeech: Unified Speech Representation Learning with Labeled and Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07597/) (2021)
- [ContentVec: An Improved Self-Supervised Speech Representation by Disentangling Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09224/) (2022)
- [SLUE: New Benchmark Tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation on Natural Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10367/) (2021)
- [mHuBERT-147: A Compact Multilingual HuBERT Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06371/) (2024)
- [Audio Self-supervised Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01205/) (2022)
- [LiRA: Learning Visual Speech Representations from Audio through Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09171/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Contrastive Cross-Modality Representation Learning for Spoken Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03381/) (2021)
- [Joint Unsupervised and Supervised Training for Multilingual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08137/) (2021)
- [Universal Paralinguistic Speech Representations Using Self-Supervised Conformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04621/) (2021)
- [SAMU-XLSR: Semantically-Aligned Multimodal Utterance-level Cross-Lingual Speech Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08180/) (2022)
- [Deep versus Wide: An Analysis of Student Architectures for Task-Agnostic Knowledge Distillation of Self-Supervised Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06867/) (2022)
- [A Multimodal Corpus for Emotion Recognition in Sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02119/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Video-To-Speech Synthesis using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13332/) (2021)
- [Beyond Just Vision: A Review on Self-Supervised Representation Learning on Multimodal and Temporal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02353/) (2022)
- [SUPERB @ SLT 2022: Challenge on Generalization and Efficiency of Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08634/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning good representations without supervision is still an open issue in machine learning, and is particularly challenging for speech signals, which are often characterized by long sequences with a complex hierarchical structure. Some recent works, however, have shown that it is possible to derive useful speech representations by employing a self-supervised encoder-discriminator approach. This paper proposes an improved self-supervised method, where a single neural encoder is followed by multiple workers that jointly solve different self-supervised tasks. The needed consensus across different tasks naturally imposes meaningful constraints to the encoder, contributing to discover general representations and to minimize the risk of learning superficial ones. Experiments show that the proposed approach can learn transferable, robust, and problem-agnostic features that carry on relevant information from the speech signal, such as speaker identity, phonemes, and even higher-level features such as emotional cues. In addition, a number of design choices make the encoder easily exportable, facilitating its direct usage or adaptation to different problems.