Implementation of SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition

• The paper introduces three techniques for augmenting speech data in speech recognition.
• They come from the observation that spectrograms which often used as input can be treated as images, so various image augmentation methods can be applied.
• I find the idea interesting.
• It covers three methods: time warping, frequency masking, and time masking.
• Details are clearly explained in the paper.
• While the first one, time warping, looks salient apparently, Daniel, the first author, told me that indeed the other two are much more important than time warping, so it can be ignored if necessary. (Thanks for the advice, Daniel!)
• I found that implementing time warping with TensorFlow is tricky because the relevant functions are based on the static shape of the melspectrogram tensor, which is hard to get from the pre-defined graph.
• I test frequency / time masking on Tensor2tensor's LibriSpeech Clean Small Task.
• The paper used the LAS model, but I stick to Transformer.
• To compare the effect of specAugment, I also run a base model, which is without augmentation.
• With 4 GPUs, training (for 500K) seems to take more than a week.

• TensorFlow==1.12.0
• tensor2tensor==1.12.0

echo "No specAugment"
# Set Paths
MODEL=transformer
HPARAMS=transformer_librispeech_v1

PROBLEM=librispeech_clean_small
DATA_DIR=data/no_spec
TMP_DIR=tmp
TRAIN_DIR=train/$PROBLEM

mkdir -p $DATA_DIR $TMP_DIR $TRAIN_DIR

# Generate data
t2t-datagen \
  --data_dir=$DATA_DIR \
  --tmp_dir=$TMP_DIR \
  --problem=$PROBLEM

# Train
t2t-trainer \
  --data_dir=$DATA_DIR \
  --problem=$PROBLEM \
  --model=$MODEL \
  --hparams_set=$HPARAMS \
  --output_dir=$TRAIN_DIR \
  --train_steps=500000 \
  --eval_steps=3 \
  --local_eval_frequency=5000 \ 
  --worker_gpu=4

echo "specAugment"
# Set Paths
PROBLEM=librispeech_specaugment
DATA_DIR=data/spec
TMP_DIR=tmp
TRAIN_DIR=train/$PROBLEM
USER_DIR=USER_DIR

mkdir -p $DATA_DIR $TMP_DIR $TRAIN_DIR

# Generate data
t2t-datagen \
  --data_dir=$DATA_DIR \
  --tmp_dir=$TMP_DIR \
  --problem=$PROBLEM

# Train
t2t-trainer \
  --t2t_usr_dir=$USER_DIR \
  --data_dir=$DATA_DIR \
  --problem=$PROBLEM \
  --model=$MODEL \
  --hparams_set=$HPARAMS \
  --output_dir=$TRAIN_DIR \
  --train_steps=500000 \
  --eval_steps=3 \
  --local_eval_frequency=5000 \ 
  --worker_gpu=4

• Apparently augmentation seems to do harm on training loss. It is understandable and expected.

• The base model looks messy. The WER hangs around 26%, which is bad.
• The specAugment model looks much neater. The WER reached 20% after 500k of training. I don't think it is good enough, though.