# Resource-Efficient Transfer Learning From Speech Foundation Model Using Hierarchical Feature Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02712/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04647/) (2021)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [Layer-wise Analysis of a Self-supervised Speech Representation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04734/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Learning with Random-projection Quantizer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01855/) (2022)
- [BigSSL: Exploring the Frontier of Large-Scale Semi-Supervised Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13226/) (2021)
- [Generative Pre-Training for Speech with Autoregressive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12607/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Pre-training of Bidirectional Speech Encoders via Masked Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10603/) (2020)
- [Toward domain-invariant speech recognition via large scale training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05312/) (2018)
- [Large-scale ASR Domain Adaptation using Self- and Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00165/) (2021)
- [Investigation of Ensemble features of Self-Supervised Pretrained Models for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05518/) (2022)
- [Incremental Layer-wise Self-Supervised Learning for Efficient Speech Domain Adaptation On Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00155/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Test-Time Training for Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10930/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Recurrent Adapters for Efficient Multi-Task Adaptation of Large Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19709/) (2024)
- [Unifying Model and Layer Fusion for Speech Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08389/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised pre-training of a speech foundation model, followed by supervised fine-tuning, has shown impressive quality improvements on automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. Fine-tuning separate foundation models for many downstream tasks are expensive since the foundation model is usually very big. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods (e.g. adapter, sparse update methods) offer an alternative paradigm where a small set of parameters are updated to adapt the foundation model to new tasks. However, these methods still suffer from a high computational memory cost and slow training speed because they require backpropagation through the entire neural network at each step. In the paper, we analyze the performance of features at different layers of a foundation model on the speech recognition task and propose a novel hierarchical feature fusion method for resource-efficient transfer learning from speech foundation models. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance on speech recognition task than existing algorithms with fewer number of trainable parameters, less computational memory cost and faster training speed. After combining with Adapters at all layers, the proposed method can achieve the same performance as fine-tuning the whole model with 97% fewer trainable encoder parameters and 53% faster training speed.