# PARROT: Synergizing Mamba and Attention-based SSL Pre-Trained Models via Parallel Branch Hadamard Optimal Transport for Speech Emotion Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01138 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01138/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Speech and audio SSMs, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Speech and audio SSMs](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/speech-and-audio-ssms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Emotion Recognition from Speech Using Wav2vec 2.0 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03502/) (2021)
- [Speech Emotion Recognition using Self-Supervised Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03896/) (2022)
- [UniSpeech-SAT: Universal Speech Representation Learning with Speaker Aware Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05752/) (2021)
- [SSAMBA: Self-Supervised Audio Representation Learning with Mamba State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11831/) (2024)
- [Audio Mamba: Bidirectional State Space Model for Audio Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03344/) (2024)
- [Speech Self-Supervised Representation Benchmarking: Are We Doing it Right?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00452/) (2023)
- [Audio Mamba: Selective State Spaces for Self-Supervised Audio Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02178/) (2024)
- [Heterogeneity over Homogeneity: Investigating Multilingual Speech Pre-Trained Models for Detecting Audio Deepfake](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00809/) (2024)
- [Investigation of Ensemble features of Self-Supervised Pretrained Models for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05518/) (2022)
- [SER Evals: In-domain and Out-of-domain Benchmarking for Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07851/) (2024)
- [Is Everything Fine, Grandma? Acoustic and Linguistic Modeling for Robust Elderly Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03432/) (2020)
- [Are Paralinguistic Representations all that is needed for Speech Emotion Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01579/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The emergence of Mamba as an alternative to attention-based architectures has led to the development of Mamba-based self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-trained models (PTMs) for speech and audio processing. Recent studies suggest that these models achieve comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) attention-based PTMs for speech emotion recognition (SER). Motivated by prior work demonstrating the benefits of PTM fusion across different speech processing tasks, we hypothesize that leveraging the complementary strengths of Mamba-based and attention-based PTMs will enhance SER performance beyond the fusion of homogenous attention-based PTMs. To this end, we introduce a novel framework, PARROT that integrates parallel branch fusion with Optimal Transport and Hadamard Product. Our approach achieves SOTA results against individual PTMs, homogeneous PTMs fusion, and baseline fusion techniques, thus, highlighting the potential of heterogeneous PTM fusion for SER.