Speech Self-Supervised Representation Benchmarking: Are We Doing it
  Right?
Salah Zaiem Youcef Kemiche Titouan Parcollet Slim Essid Mirco Ravanelli
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently allowed leveraging large datasets
of unlabeled speech signals to reach impressive performance on speech tasks
using only small amounts of annotated data. The high number of proposed
approaches fostered the need and rise of extended benchmarks that evaluate
their performance on a set of downstream tasks exploring various aspects of the
speech signal. However, and while the number of considered tasks has been
growing, most rely upon a single decoding architecture that maps the frozen SSL
representations to the downstream labels. This work investigates the robustness
of such benchmarking results to changes in the decoder architecture.
Interestingly, it appears that varying the architecture of the downstream
decoder leads to significant variations in the leaderboards of most tasks.
Concerningly, our study reveals that benchmarking using limited decoders may
cause a counterproductive increase in the sizes of the developed SSL models.