The SpeechBrain Toolkit Files

This is a minor update which includes some new features and recipes, internal improvements, bugfixes and improved tutorials.

Here follows a changelog of the main changes (omitting some minor bugfixes):

Notable changes

• Added support for Adapters, see new tutorial (#2563)
• Added BEST-RQ with a recipe for LibriSpeech (#2309)
• Added GigaSpeech recipes for ASR, with a Conformer RNN-T and WavLM CTC (#2421)
• Overhauled fetch and Pretrained, greatly reducing the use of symlinks out of the box as much as possible (see down below)
• Migrated all tutorials to the SpeechBrain repository, merged them into the main docs, improved documentation (updated outdated information, broken links, etc.).
• Added new tutorials:
  • Metrics for Speech Recognition
  • Neural Network Adapters for faster low-memory fine-tuning
  • Streaming Speech Recognition with Conformers
• TensorFloat32 is now enabled by default when available (#2682)

New features

• Added layer dropout support for TransformerASR (#2309)
• Added the sign flip augmentation for ASR/EEG/potentially more (#2636)
• Improved reproducibility by adding seed_everything, improved DDP handling for seeding (#2654)
• Added "quirks" to centralize overriden PyTorch defaults and workarounds (among other things) in an easy-to-find fashion, with proper logging (#2558)

Bugfixes

• Improved performance for VAD inference (#2683)
• Fixed various issues with DDP handling (#2682)
• Fixed broken augmentation integration tests (#2628)
• Fixed error when processing newer CommonVoice (#2647)
• Fixed concat bug in augmentation (#2717)
• Removed EOS in G2P inference which was incorrectly introduced (#2718)
• ... and some more

New fetching semantics

We have made a number of changes that affect how fetch works, and this affects various things in a way you should be aware of.

• In various fetching-related code, such as inference interfaces' from_hparams, the savedir refers to the directory where files should be collected. It is now optional and defaults to None.
• When fetching files (models, audio, etc.) from local paths or HuggingFace repositories, you no longer need to specify a target directory.
  • For local file fetching, the path is returned directly.
  • For HF fetching, HF cache is used directly.
  • For URL fetching, you still need to specify the savedir.
• Inference interfaces will no longer pollute your working directory with symlinks by default when loading audio files.
• Avoiding symlink creation by default is now much friendlier to Windows compatibility. We also added some warnings to help.
• If you do specify a savedir, behavior should be largely unchanged (although more robust).
• In various fetching-related code, you can now specify a fetch_strategy.
• The fetching strategy dictates what to do when a file is found locally, but not in the desired savedir. For instance, if some model file is available in HuggingFace cache, you can now choose between copying, symlinking or not linking the file in the savedir.
• fetch now has an allow_network parameter, which defaults to True. When disabled, this fails if the URI is not available locally, or if the file isn't found locally in HF cache.
• fetch also now has an allow_updates parameter, which defaults to True. It interrogates HF even if a local path is present in order to update any model files (or switch revisions), if required.