# Test-Time Training for Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10930 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10930/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (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)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Speech Commands: A Dataset for Limited-Vocabulary Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03209/) (2018)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains via Adversarial Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12018/) (2018)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization via Model-Agnostic Learning of Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13580/) (2019)
- [VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06825/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders that Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06405/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Prediction-Time Batch Normalization for Robustness under Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10963/) (2020)
- [Test-Time Training with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07522/) (2022)
- [Surgical Fine-Tuning Improves Adaptation to Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11466/) (2022)
- [Mockingjay: Unsupervised Speech Representation Learning with Deep Bidirectional Transformer Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12638/) (2019)
- [SSAST: Self-Supervised Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09784/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Beyond Model Adaptation at Test Time: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03687/) (2024)
- [Learning from Trials and Errors: Reflective Test-Time Planning for Embodied LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21198/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Training for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01847/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Training for Depression Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05071/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we study the application of Test-Time Training (TTT) as a solution to handling distribution shifts in speech applications. In particular, we introduce distribution-shifts to the test datasets of standard speech-classification tasks -- for example, speaker-identification and emotion-detection -- and explore how Test-Time Training (TTT) can help adjust to the distribution-shift. In our experiments that include distribution shifts due to background noise and natural variations in speech such as gender and age, we identify some key-challenges with TTT including sensitivity to optimization hyperparameters (e.g., number of optimization steps and subset of parameters chosen for TTT) and scalability (e.g., as each example gets its own set of parameters, TTT is not scalable). Finally, we propose using BitFit -- a parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm proposed for text applications that only considers the bias parameters for fine-tuning -- as a solution to the aforementioned challenges and demonstrate that it is consistently more stable than fine-tuning all the parameters of the model.