# Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10643 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/

## Key facts

- Cited by 260 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 226 of its 367 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 226)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03499/) (2016)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 260)

- [Comparative layer-wise analysis of self-supervised speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03929/) (2022)
- [On The Landscape of Spoken Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08528/) (2025)
- [Dynamic-SUPERB: Towards A Dynamic, Collaborative, and Comprehensive Instruction-Tuning Benchmark for Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09510/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Time Series Analysis: Taxonomy, Progress, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10125/) (2023)
- [SpeechTokenizer: Unified Speech Tokenizer for Speech Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16692/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03751/) (2024)
- [MMEarth: Exploring Multi-Modal Pretext Tasks For Geospatial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02771/) (2024)
- [BASE TTS: Lessons from building a billion-parameter Text-to-Speech model on 100K hours of data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08093/) (2024)
- [ML-SUPERB: Multilingual Speech Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10615/) (2023)
- [MuQ: Self-Supervised Music Representation Learning with Mel Residual Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01108/) (2025)
- [What Do Self-Supervised Speech Models Know About Words?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00162/) (2023)
- [EARS: An Anechoic Fullband Speech Dataset Benchmarked for Speech Enhancement and Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06185/) (2024)
- [YODAS: Youtube-Oriented Dataset for Audio and Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00899/) (2024)
- [MAViL: Masked Audio-Video Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08071/) (2022)
- [Automated Medical Coding on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV: A Critical Review and Replicability Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10909/) (2023)
- [Jointly Learning Visual and Auditory Speech Representations from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06246/) (2022)
- [Advancing Large Language Models to Capture Varied Speaking Styles and Respond Properly in Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12786/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Discrete Speech Tokens: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06490/) (2025)
- [On the Utility of Self-supervised Models for Prosody-related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07185/) (2022)
- [Reproducing Whisper-Style Training Using an Open-Source Toolkit and Publicly Available Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13876/) (2023)
- [VATLM: Visual-Audio-Text Pre-Training with Unified Masked Prediction for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11275/) (2022)
- [DinoSR: Self-Distillation and Online Clustering for Self-supervised Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10005/) (2023)
- [SSAMBA: Self-Supervised Audio Representation Learning with Mamba State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11831/) (2024)
- [DPHuBERT: Joint Distillation and Pruning of Self-Supervised Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17651/) (2023)
- [SLUE Phase-2: A Benchmark Suite of Diverse Spoken Language Understanding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10525/) (2022)
- [SpeechPrompt v2: Prompt Tuning for Speech Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00733/) (2023)
- [Evidence of Vocal Tract Articulation in Self-Supervised Learning of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11723/) (2022)
- [Structured Pruning of Self-Supervised Pre-trained Models for Speech Recognition and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14132/) (2023)
- [SpeechCLIP: Integrating Speech with Pre-Trained Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00705/) (2022)
- [BabySLM: language-acquisition-friendly benchmark of self-supervised spoken language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01506/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although supervised deep learning has revolutionized speech and audio processing, it has necessitated the building of specialist models for individual tasks and application scenarios. It is likewise difficult to apply this to dialects and languages for which only limited labeled data is available. Self-supervised representation learning methods promise a single universal model that would benefit a wide variety of tasks and domains. Such methods have shown success in natural language processing and computer vision domains, achieving new levels of performance while reducing the number of labels required for many downstream scenarios. Speech representation learning is experiencing similar progress in three main categories: generative, contrastive, and predictive methods. Other approaches rely on multi-modal data for pre-training, mixing text or visual data streams with speech. Although self-supervised speech representation is still a nascent research area, it is closely related to acoustic word embedding and learning with zero lexical resources, both of which have seen active research for many years. This review presents approaches for self-supervised speech representation learning and their connection to other research areas. Since many current methods focus solely on automatic speech recognition as a downstream task, we review recent efforts on benchmarking learned representations to extend the application beyond speech recognition.