SpidR: Learning Fast and Stable Linguistic Units for Spoken Language Models Without Supervision

[📜 arXiv] · [📖 OpenReview] · [🖋️ BibTeX]

This repository contains the checkpoints and training code for the self-supervised speech models from the SpidR paper.

Overview

SpidR is a self-supervised speech representation model that efficiently learns strong representations for spoken language modeling. It is trained on unlabelled speech using a masked prediction objective combined with self-distillation and online clustering. The intermediate layers of the student model learn to predict assignments derived from the teacher intermediate layers. This learning objective stabilizes the online clustering procedure compared to previous approaches, resulting in higher-quality codebooks. SpidR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on downstream language modeling metrics.

Using this repository, you can pretrain SpidR for 400k steps in only a day on 16 A100, and in 15 hours on 16 H100. We distribute two checkpoints: SpidR and DinoSR pretrained with this codebase on LibriSpeech.

Installation

This is available as a package on PyPI. To use the pretrained models, the only dependencies are torch>=2.13.0 and numpy>=1.26.4, with Python 3.12 at least. If you want to train your own model, install the optional train dependencies¹.

For inference:

pip install spidr

For training:

pip install spidr[train]

Or if you want to tinker with this repository, clone it and create a virtual environment with uv:

git clone https://github.com/facebookresearch/spidr
cd spidr
uv sync --extra train

You need the optional dependencies to import spidr.data, spidr.slurm, spidr.train, spidr.validate, and to run the scripts in paper/. As we use TorchCodec, you will need to have FFmpeg installed for training.

Usage

Using a pretrained model

We distribute two checkpoints used in our paper: spidr_base and dinosr_base_reproduced. Both are pretrained on LibriSpeech 960h. You can load them like this:

from spidr.models import spidr_base, dinosr_base_reproduced

spidr_model = spidr_base().to("cuda")
dinosr_model = dinosr_base_reproduced().to("cuda")

Or if you don't want to install this library, you can use torch.hub.load:

import torch

spidr_model = torch.hub.load("facebookresearch/spidr", "spidr_base")
dinosr_model = torch.hub.load("facebookresearch/spidr", "dinor_base_reproduced")

Similarly, you can use the spidr.models.dinosr_base_original function to load the original DinoSR checkpoint.

The forward function of SpidR and DinoSR returns the loss and the perplexities. To get intermediate representations use the get_intermediate_outputs method, or the get_codebooks method if you prefer to extract the codebook predictions from the student model.

See paper/extract_features.py for an example of how to use the pretrained models.

Launching training runs

Manifest files

First, create a manifest file that contains the paths to the audio files and the number of samples (either CSV file or TSV like in fairseq). We support loading audio files from an uncompressed tar archive. Use spidr.data.write_manifest to easily create it:

❯ python -m spidr.data.write_manifest --help
usage: write_manifest.py [-h] [--ext EXT] [--fairseq] dataset output

Write manifest files.

positional arguments:
  dataset     Path to the dataset directory or uncompressed tar file.
  output      Path to the output manifest file.

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --ext EXT   Extension of audio files. (default: .wav)
  --fairseq   Write a Fairseq-style TSV manifest, instead of CSV.

Configuration

Create a TOML configuration file for the training run. This will be used to create an instance of spidr.config.Config. Check out src/spidr/config.py to see the available fields. You can start from configs/example.toml (it only specifies the required fields).

Training

We provide utilities to launch jobs on a SLURM cluster. The training run is in one job, and the validation is launched in separate jobs to not interrupt training. You can launch a training run from your terminal:

❯ python -m spidr --help
usage: __main__.py [-h] -A ACCOUNT -N NODES -G GPUS_PER_NODE [-c CPUS_PER_TASK] [--mem-per-gpu MEM_PER_GPU] [-t TIME]
                   [-C CONSTRAINT] [-q QOS] [--dump DUMP]
                   configs [configs ...]

Launch training runs.

positional arguments:
  configs               TOML config file(s) for the training run(s).

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -A ACCOUNT, --account ACCOUNT
                        SLURM account (default: None)
  -N NODES, --nodes NODES
                        Number of nodes (default: None)
  -G GPUS_PER_NODE, --gpus-per-node GPUS_PER_NODE
                        GPUs per node (default: None)
  -c CPUS_PER_TASK, --cpus-per-task CPUS_PER_TASK
                        CPUs per task (default: None)
  --mem-per-gpu MEM_PER_GPU
                        Memory per GPU (default: None)
  -t TIME, --time TIME  Time limit in minutes (default: None)
  -C CONSTRAINT, --constraint CONSTRAINT
                        SLURM constraint (default: None)
  -q QOS, --qos QOS     SLURM qos (default: None)
  --dump DUMP           Submitit dump (default: None)

By default we use torch.compile, the first batches will be quite slow to process. To speed up training, you can also remove the computation of the perplexities in the source code if you do not care about it.

Citing SpidR

@article{
  poli2025spidr,
  title={SpidR: Learning Fast and Stable Linguistic Units for Spoken Language Models Without Supervision},
  author={Maxime Poli and Mahi Luthra and Youssef Benchekroun and Yosuke Higuchi and Martin Gleize and Jiayi Shen and Robin Algayres and Yu-An Chung and Mido Assran and Juan Pino and Emmanuel Dupoux},
  journal={Transactions on Machine Learning Research},
  issn={2835-8856},
  year={2025},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=E7XAFBpfZs},
}

License

The source code and our two model checkpoints are provided under the CC BY-NC 4.0 License.