Speech separation with large-scale self-supervised learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods such as WavLM have shown promising speech separation (SS) results in small-scale simulation-based experiments. In this work, we extend the exploration of the SSL-based SS by massively scaling up both the pre-training data (more than 300K hours) and fine-tuning data (10K hours). We also investigate various techniques to efficiently integrate the pre-trained model with the SS network under a limited computation budget, including a low frame rate SSL model training setup and a fine-tuning scheme using only the part of the pre-trained model. Compared with a supervised baseline and the WavLM-based SS model using feature embeddings obtained with the previously released 94K hours trained WavLM, our proposed model obtains 15.9% and 11.2% of relative word error rate (WER) reductions, respectively, for a simulated far-field speech mixture test set. For conversation transcription on real meeting recordings using continuous speech separation, the proposed model achieves 6.8% and 10.6% of relative WER reductions over the purely supervised baseline on AMI and ICSI evaluation sets, respectively, while reducing the computational cost by 38%.