The foundation model paradigm leverages a shared foundation model to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for various tasks, requiring minimal downstream-specific modeling and data annotation. This approach has proven crucial in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, the speech processing community lacks a similar setup to explore the paradigm systematically. In this work, we establish the Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark (SUPERB) to study the effectiveness of the paradigm for speech. We propose a unified multi-tasking framework to address speech processing tasks in SUPERB using a frozen foundation model followed by task-specialized, lightweight prediction heads. Combining our results with community submissions, we verify that the foundation model paradigm is promising for speech, and our multi-tasking framework is simple yet effective, as the best-performing foundation model shows competitive generalizability across most SUPERB tasks. For reproducibility and extensibility, we have developed a long-term maintained platform that enables deterministic benchmarking, allows for result sharing via an online leaderboard, and promotes collaboration through a community-driven benchmark database to support new development cycles. Finally, we conduct a series of analyses to offer an in-depth understanding of SUPERB and speech foundation models, including information flows across tasks inside the models, the correctness of the weighted-sum benchmarking protocol and the statistical significance and robustness of the benchmark.

Sensor data has been playing an important role in machine learning tasks, complementary to the human-annotated data that is usually rather costly. However, due to systematic or accidental mis-operations, sensor data comes very often with a variety of missing values, resulting in considerable difficulties in the follow-up analysis and visualization. Previous work imputes the missing values by interpolating in the observational feature space, without consulting any latent (hidden) dynamics. In contrast, our model captures the latent complex temporal dynamics by summarizing each observation’s context with a novel Iterative Imputing Network, thus significantly outperforms previous work on the benchmark Beijing air quality and meteorological dataset. Our model also yields consistent superiority over other methods in cases of different missing rates.

Sensor data has been playing an important role in machine learning tasks, complementary to the human-annotated data that is usually rather costly. However, due to systematic or accidental mis-operations, sensor data comes very often with a variety of missing values, resulting in considerable difficulties in the follow-up analysis and visualization. Previous work imputes the missing values by interpolating in the observational feature space, without consulting any latent (hidden) dynamics. In contrast, our model captures the latent complex temporal dynamics by summarizing each observation's context with a novel Iterative Imputing Network, thus significantly outperforms previous work on the benchmark Beijing air quality and meteorological dataset. Our model also yields consistent superiority over other methods in cases of different missing rates.