# EH-MAM: Easy-to-Hard Masked Acoustic Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13179/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Speech Commands: A Dataset for Limited-Vocabulary Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03209/) (2018)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10190/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [Mockingjay: Unsupervised Speech Representation Learning with Deep Bidirectional Transformer Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12638/) (2019)
- [Speech Model Pre-training for End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03670/) (2019)
- [DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01900/) (2021)
- [What to Hide from Your Students: Attention-Guided Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12719/) (2022)
- [RetroMAE: Pre-Training Retrieval-oriented Language Models Via Masked Auto-Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12035/) (2022)
- [XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16138/) (2021)
- [DinoSR: Self-Distillation and Online Clustering for Self-supervised Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10005/) (2023)
- [InforMask: Unsupervised Informative Masking for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11771/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Improvement of Factual Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01597/) (2023)
- [data2vec-aqc: Search for the right Teaching Assistant in the Teacher-Student training setup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01246/) (2022)

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

- [SpidR: Learning Fast and Stable Linguistic Units for Spoken Language Models Without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20308/) (2025)
- [Hardness-Aware Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Robust Multimodal Emotion Recognition with Missing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06800/) (2025)
- [Curriculum Multi-Task Self-Supervision Improves Lightweight Architectures for Onboard Satellite Hyperspectral Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13229/) (2025)
- [AaSP: Aliasing-aware Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Audio Spectrogram Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03637/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present EH-MAM (Easy-to-Hard adaptive Masked Acoustic Modeling), a novel self-supervised learning approach for speech representation learning. In contrast to the prior methods that use random masking schemes for Masked Acoustic Modeling (MAM), we introduce a novel selective and adaptive masking strategy. Specifically, during SSL training, we progressively introduce harder regions to the model for reconstruction. Our approach automatically selects hard regions and is built on the observation that the reconstruction loss of individual frames in MAM can provide natural signals to judge the difficulty of solving the MAM pre-text task for that frame. To identify these hard regions, we employ a teacher model that first predicts the frame-wise losses and then decides which frames to mask. By learning to create challenging problems, such as identifying harder frames and solving them simultaneously, the model is able to learn more effective representations and thereby acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the speech. Quantitatively, EH-MAM outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines across various low-resource speech recognition and SUPERB benchmarks by 5%-10%. Additionally, we conduct a thorough analysis to show that the regions masked by EH-MAM effectively capture useful context across speech frames.