# Don't Stop Self-Supervision: Accent Adaptation of Speech Representations via Residual Adapters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.00453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00453/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [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)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07779/) (2020)
- [Deep Contextualized Acoustic Representations For Semi-Supervised Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01679/) (2019)
- [wav2letter++: The Fastest Open-source Speech Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07625/) (2018)
- [Residual Adapters for Parameter-Efficient ASR Adaptation to Atypical and Accented Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06952/) (2021)
- [DRAFT: A Novel Framework to Reduce Domain Shifting in Self-supervised Learning and Its Application to Children's ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07931/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Improving Self-supervised Pre-training using Accent-Specific Codebooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03734/) (2024)
- [AURA: Uncertainty-Routed Activation Editing for Acoustic Grounding in Speech Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23979/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech representations learned in a self-supervised fashion from massive unlabeled speech corpora have been adapted successfully toward several downstream tasks. However, such representations may be skewed toward canonical data characteristics of such corpora and perform poorly on atypical, non-native accented speaker populations. With the state-of-the-art HuBERT model as a baseline, we propose and investigate self-supervised adaptation of speech representations to such populations in a parameter-efficient way via training accent-specific residual adapters. We experiment with 4 accents and choose automatic speech recognition (ASR) as the downstream task of interest. We obtain strong word error rate reductions (WERR) over HuBERT-large for all 4 accents, with a mean WERR of 22.7% with accent-specific adapters and a mean WERR of 25.1% if the entire encoder is accent-adapted. While our experiments utilize HuBERT and ASR as the downstream task, our proposed approach is both model and task-agnostic.