Wav2Small: Distilling Wav2Vec2 to 72K parameters for Low-Resource Speech emotion recognition
<|reference_start|>Wav2Small: Distilling Wav2Vec2 to 72K parameters for Low-Resource Speech emotion recognition: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) needs high computational resources to overcome the challenge of substantial annotator disagreement. Today SER is shifting towards dimensional annotations of arousal, dominance, and valence (A/D/V). Universal metrics as the L2 distance prove unsuitable for evaluating A/D/V accuracy due to non converging consensus of annotator opinions. However, Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) arose as an alternative metric for A/D/V where a model's output is evaluated to match a whole dataset's CCC rather than L2 distances of individual audios. Recent studies have shown that wav2vec2 / wavLM architectures outputing a float value for each A/D/V dimension achieve today's State-of-the-art (Sota) CCC on A/D/V. The Wav2Vec2.0 / WavLM family has a high computational footprint, but training small models using human annotations has been unsuccessful. In this paper we use a large Transformer Sota A/D/V model as Teacher/Annotator to train 5 student models: 4 MobileNets and our proposed Wav2Small, using only the Teacher's A/D/V outputs instead of human annotations. The Teacher model we propose also sets a new Sota on the MSP Podcast dataset of valence CCC=0.676. We choose MobileNetV4 / MobileNet-V3 as students, as MobileNet has been designed for fast execution times. We also propose Wav2Small - an architecture designed for minimal parameters and RAM consumption. Wav2Small with an .onnx (quantised) of only 120KB is a potential solution for A/D/V on hardware with low resources, having only 72K parameters vs 3.12M parameters for MobileNet-V4-Small.<|reference_end|>
@article{kounadis-bastian2024wav2small:,
    title={Wav2Small: Distilling Wav2Vec2 to 72K parameters for Low-Resource Speech
  emotion recognition},
    author={Dionyssos Kounadis-Bastian, Oliver Schr"ufer, Anna Derington, Hagen
  Wierstorf, Florian Eyben, Felix Burkhardt, Bj"orn Schuller},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.13920},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.13920},
    primaryClass={cs.SD eess.AS}
}