# Contrastive Augmentation: An Unsupervised Learning Approach for Keyword Spotting in Speech Technology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00356 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00356/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2024.

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

- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Speech Commands: A Dataset for Limited-Vocabulary Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03209/) (2018)
- [Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.5567/) (2014)
- [An Unsupervised Autoregressive Model for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03240/) (2019)
- [Improved Noisy Student Training for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09629/) (2020)
- [Data Augmenting Contrastive Learning of Speech Representations in the Time Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00991/) (2020)
- [A neural attention model for speech command recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08929/) (2018)
- [MatchboxNet: 1D Time-Channel Separable Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Speech Commands Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08531/) (2020)
- [Improving Transformer-based Speech Recognition Using Unsupervised Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09932/) (2019)
- [Learning Efficient Representations for Keyword Spotting with Triplet Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04792/) (2021)
- [Scaling up sign spotting through sign language dictionaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04152/) (2022)
- [Noisy student-teacher training for robust keyword spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01604/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Silent Speech Recognition with Acoustic Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11315/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper addresses the persistent challenge in Keyword Spotting (KWS), a fundamental component in speech technology, regarding the acquisition of substantial labeled data for training. Given the difficulty in obtaining large quantities of positive samples and the laborious process of collecting new target samples when the keyword changes, we introduce a novel approach combining unsupervised contrastive learning and a unique augmentation-based technique. Our method allows the neural network to train on unlabeled data sets, potentially improving performance in downstream tasks with limited labeled data sets. We also propose that similar high-level feature representations should be employed for speech utterances with the same keyword despite variations in speed or volume. To achieve this, we present a speech augmentation-based unsupervised learning method that utilizes the similarity between the bottleneck layer feature and the audio reconstructing information for auxiliary training. Furthermore, we propose a compressed convolutional architecture to address potential redundancy and non-informative information in KWS tasks, enabling the model to simultaneously learn local features and focus on long-term information. This method achieves strong performance on the Google Speech Commands V2 Dataset. Inspired by recent advancements in sign spotting and spoken term detection, our method underlines the potential of our contrastive learning approach in KWS and the advantages of Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection strategies. The presented CAB-KWS provide new perspectives in the field of KWS, demonstrating effective ways to reduce data collection efforts and increase the system's robustness.