# Speech foundation models on intelligibility prediction for hearing-impaired listeners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14289 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14289/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [Robust wav2vec 2.0: Analyzing Domain Shift in Self-Supervised Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01027/) (2021)
- [The Zero Resource Speech Benchmark 2021: Metrics and baselines for unsupervised spoken language modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11588/) (2020)
- [Whisper-AT: Noise-Robust Automatic Speech Recognizers are Also Strong General Audio Event Taggers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03183/) (2023)
- [MBI-Net: A Non-Intrusive Multi-Branched Speech Intelligibility Prediction Model for Hearing Aids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03305/) (2022)
- [Non Intrusive Intelligibility Predictor for Hearing Impaired Individuals using Self Supervised Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13423/) (2023)
- [Clarity: Machine Learning Challenges to Revolutionise Hearing Device Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11140/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Unveiling the Best Practices for Applying Speech Foundation Models to Speech Intelligibility Prediction for Hearing-Impaired People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08215/) (2025)
- [Transfer Learning from Whisper for Microscopic Intelligibility Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01737/) (2024)
- [Improving Perceptual Audio Aesthetic Assessment via Triplet Loss and Self-Supervised Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03292/) (2025)
- [No Audiogram: Leveraging Existing Scores for Personalized Speech Intelligibility Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02039/) (2025)
- [Non-Intrusive Binaural Speech Intelligibility Prediction Using Mamba for Hearing-Impaired Listeners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05729/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Multiple Speech Enhancers for Non-Intrusive Intelligibility Prediction for Hearing-Impaired Listeners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16979/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech foundation models (SFMs) have been benchmarked on many speech processing tasks, often achieving state-of-the-art performance with minimal adaptation. However, the SFM paradigm has been significantly less explored for applications of interest to the speech perception community. In this paper we present a systematic evaluation of 10 SFMs on one such application: Speech intelligibility prediction. We focus on the non-intrusive setup of the Clarity Prediction Challenge 2 (CPC2), where the task is to predict the percentage of words correctly perceived by hearing-impaired listeners from speech-in-noise recordings. We propose a simple method that learns a lightweight specialized prediction head on top of frozen SFMs to approach the problem. Our results reveal statistically significant differences in performance across SFMs. Our method resulted in the winning submission in the CPC2, demonstrating its promise for speech perception applications.