# HARNESS: Lightweight Distilled Arabic Speech Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14186 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14186/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [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)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10643/) (2022)
- [DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01900/) (2021)
- [ML-SUPERB: Multilingual Speech Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10615/) (2023)
- [Fanar: An Arabic-Centric Multimodal Generative AI Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13944/) (2025)
- [Speech Recognition Challenge in the Wild: Arabic MGB-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07276/) (2017)
- [LightHuBERT: Lightweight and Configurable Speech Representation Learning with Once-for-All Hidden-Unit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15610/) (2022)
- [QASR: QCRI Aljazeera Speech Resource -- A Large Scale Annotated Arabic Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13000/) (2021)
- [DPHuBERT: Joint Distillation and Pruning of Self-Supervised Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17651/) (2023)
- [Deep versus Wide: An Analysis of Student Architectures for Task-Agnostic Knowledge Distillation of Self-Supervised Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06867/) (2022)
- [FitHuBERT: Going Thinner and Deeper for Knowledge Distillation of Speech Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00555/) (2022)
- [The MGB-2 Challenge: Arabic Multi-Dialect Broadcast Media Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05625/) (2016)
- [Yet Another Model for Arabic Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13812/) (2023)
- [SKILL: Similarity-aware Knowledge distILLation for Speech Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16830/) (2024)
- [ArabEmoNet: A Lightweight Hybrid 2D CNN-BiLSTM Model with Attention for Robust Arabic Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01401/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large self-supervised speech (SSL) models achieve strong downstream performance, but their size limits deployment in resource-constrained settings. We present HArnESS, an Arabic-centric self-supervised speech model family trained from scratch with iterative self-distillation, together with lightweight student variants that offer strong accuracy-efficiency trade-offs on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Dialect Identification (DID), and Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). Our approach begins with a large bilingual Arabic-English teacher and progressively distills its knowledge into compressed student models while preserving Arabic-relevant acoustic and paralinguistic representations. We further study PCA-based compression of the teacher supervision signal to better match the capacity of shallow and thin students. Compared with HuBERT and XLS-R, HArnESS consistently improves performance on Arabic downstream tasks, while the compressed models remain competitive under substantial structural reduction. These results position HArnESS as a practical and accessible Arabic-centric SSL foundation for real-world speech applications.