Noisy student teacher training for robust keyword spotting

Abstract

Teacher-student learning can be used to train a keyword spotting (KWS) model using augmented training instance(s). Various implementations include aggressively augmenting (e.g., using spectral augmentation) base audio data to generate augmented audio data, where one or more portions of the base instance of audio data can be masked in the augmented instance of audio data (e.g., one or more time frames can be masked, one or more frequencies can be masked, etc.). Many implementations include processing augmented audio data using a KWS teacher model to generate a soft label, and processing the augmented audio data using a KWS student model to generate predicted output. One or more portions of the KWS student model can be updated based on a comparison of the soft label and the generated predicted output.