{"paper":{"title":"VARAN: Variational Inference for Self-Supervised Speech Models Fine-Tuning on Downstream Tasks","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Alexander Varlamov, Daria Diatlova, Egor Spirin, Nikita Balagansky","submitted_at":"2025-08-16T14:26:59Z","abstract_excerpt":"Conventional methods for aggregating layers in fine-tuned self-supervised speech models, such as using the final layer or weighted sum, suffer from information bottlenecks and static feature weighting for all dataset examples. We propose VARAN, a framework that dynamically tailors layer aggregation to individual inputs. By employing layer-specialized probing heads and data-dependent weighting, VARAN adaptively prioritizes layer's features based on input. Evaluations on automatic speech recognition and speech emotion recognition tasks demonstrate VARAN's superior performance, particularly when "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2508.12061","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2508.12061/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}