MauBERT: Universal Phonetic Inductive Biases for Few-Shot Acoustic Units Discovery

Abstract:This paper introduces MauBERT, a multilingual extension of HuBERT that leverages articulatory features for robust cross-lingual phonetic representation learning. We continue HuBERT pre-training with supervision based on a phonetic-to-articulatory feature mapping in 55 languages. Our models learn from multilingual data to predict articulatory features or phones, resulting in language-independent representations that capture multilingual phonetic properties. Through comprehensive ABX discriminability testing, we show MauBERT models produce more context-invariant representations than state-of-the-art multilingual self-supervised learning models. Additionally, the models effectively adapt to unseen languages and casual speech with minimal self-supervised fine-tuning (10 hours of speech). This establishes an effective approach for instilling linguistic inductive biases in self-supervised speech models.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)

arXiv:2512.19612 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2512.19612v3 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.19612 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.24 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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