Speech foundation models trained with self-supervised learning produce generic speech representations that support a wide range of speech processing tasks. When further adapted with supervised learning, these models can achieve strong performance on specific downstream tasks. Recent post-training approaches, such as SAMU-XSLR and SONAR, align speech representations with utterance-level semantic representations, enabling effective multimodal (speech-text) and multilingual applications. While speech foundation models typically learn contextual embeddings at the acoustic frame level, these methods learn representations at the utterance level. In this work, we extend this paradigm to arbitrary utterance-level attributes and propose a unified post-training framework that enables a single speech foundation model to generate multiple types of utterance-level representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by jointly learning semantic and speaker representations and evaluating them on multilingual speech retrieval and speaker recognition tasks.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Attribute-specific branch used to learn an utterance-level representation for attribute τ in the teacher–student framework. Layer representations from the shared SSL encoder are projected, combined using learnable interpolation weights λτ,ℓ , and aggregated by attention pooling to produce an embedding aligned with the teacher representation.
X Speech → EN Speech retrieval
R@1 ↑
fr-en
pl-en
nl-en
es-en
hr-en
de-en
ro-en
cs-en
SONAR
91.91
95.79
95.16
95.30
52.16
94.18
94.45
95.62
Att(sem)
96.55
96.46
95.75
96.48
96.5
94.71
96.83
96.70
Att(sem+spk)
95.94
95.67
95.37
96.01
95.9
93.91
96.49
96.32
EN Speech → Y Speech retrieval
R@1 ↑
en-fr
en-pl
en-nl
en-es
en-hr
en-de
en-ro
en-cs
Table 1: R@1 scores speech → speech translation retrieval for various language pairs (VoxPopuli)
X Speech → EN Text
X Speech → Y Text
R@1 ↑
it-en
fr-en
pt-en
ru-en
it-es
es-it
es-fr
fr-pt
pt-es
SONAR
89.01
82.45
85.05
84.76
92.25
88.57
87.76
84.27
87.08
Att(sem)
90.69
87.01
86.69
83.06
94.35
86.83
87.35
90.08
89.31
Att(sem+spk)
90.10
86.14
85.68
82.27
94.15
86.57
86.91
89.68
88.63
Table 2: R@1 scores speech → text translation retrieval for various language pairs (MTEDx)
X Speech → EN Text
X Speech → Y Text
R@1 ↑
ml-en
lb-en
uz-en
bs-en
my-en
ny-ces
sd-fr
xh-ar
SONAR
22.36
39.98
54.12
27.27
8.19
18.18
21.20
16.07
Att(sem)
62.59
60.88
55.40
60.39
14.11
27.00
59.74
36.67
Att(sem+spk)
61.55
59.59
55.17
60.28
16.38
25.24
58.24
35.71
Table 3: R@1 scores speech → text translation retrieval for various language pairs (FLEURS)
Model
EER ↓
MinDCF0.01↓
ECAPA-TDNN
0.90
0.1104
Att(spk)
0.93
0.1285
Att(sem+spk)
0.91
0.1253
Table 4: Speaker verification results on VoxCeleb1-O
Figure 2: Learned layer-interpolation weights for the semantic and speaker branches of the unified speech encoder.