  Continued pre-training (CP) offers multiple advantages, like target domain
adaptation and the potential to exploit the continuous stream of unlabeled data
available online. However, continued pre-training on out-of-domain
distributions often leads to catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired
knowledge, leading to sub-optimal ASR performance. This paper presents FusDom,
a simple and novel methodology for SSL-based continued pre-training. FusDom
learns speech representations that are robust and adaptive yet not forgetful of
concepts seen in the past. Instead of solving the SSL pre-text task on the
output representations of a single model, FusDom leverages two identical
pre-trained SSL models, a teacher and a student, with a modified pre-training
head to solve the CP SSL pre-text task. This head employs a cross-attention
mechanism between the representations of both models while only the student
receives gradient updates and the teacher does not. Finally, the student is
fine-tuned for ASR. In practice, FusDom outperforms all our baselines across
settings significantly, with WER improvements in the range of 0.2 WER - 7.3 WER
in the target domain while retaining the performance in the earlier domain.

Audio and Speech Processing;Artificial Intelligence;Computation and Language;Sound