A Large-Scale Evaluation of Speech Foundation Models

The foundation model paradigm leverages a shared foundation model to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for various tasks, requiring minimal downstream-specific data collection and modeling. This approach has proven crucial in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, the speech processing community lacks a similar setup to explore the paradigm systematically. To bridge this gap, we establish the Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark (SUPERB). SUPERB represents an ecosystem designed to evaluate foundation models across a wide range of speech processing tasks, facilitating the sharing of results on an online leaderboard and fostering collaboration through a community-driven benchmark database that aids in new development cycles. We present a unified learning framework for solving the speech processing tasks in SUPERB with the frozen foundation model followed by task-specialized lightweight prediction heads. Combining our results with community submissions, we verify that the framework is simple yet effective, as the best-performing foundation model shows competitive generalizability across most SUPERB tasks. Finally, we conduct a series of analyses to offer an in-depth understanding of SUPERB and speech foundation models, including information flows across tasks inside the models and the statistical significance and robustness of the benchmark.