A Language Model With Million Context Length For Raw Audio

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel auto-regressive model with a million-sample context for raw audio, combining CNNs and Transformers to effectively capture long-term dependencies and outperform existing models.

Contribution

It presents a scalable architecture that models over 500,000 samples by integrating CNN-based latent representations with Transformer encoders, trained end-to-end.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on standard long-term audio modeling datasets.

Outperforms models like Wavenet, SaSHMI, and Sample-RNN.

Demonstrates potential for scaling with larger data and parameters.

Abstract

Modeling long-term dependencies for audio signals is a particularly challenging problem, as even small-time scales yield on the order of a hundred thousand samples. With the recent advent of Transformers, neural architectures became good at modeling dependencies over longer time scales, but they suffered from quadratic constraints to scale them. We propose a generative auto-regressive architecture that can model audio waveforms over quite a large context, greater than 500,000 samples. Our work is adapted to learn time dependencies by learning a latent representation by a CNN front-end, and then learning dependencies over these representations using Transformer encoders, fully trained end-to-end: thereby allowing to learn representations as it deems fit for the next sample. Unlike previous works that compared different time scales to show improvement, we use a standard dataset, with the same number of parameters/context to show improvements. We achieve a state-of-the-art performance as compared to other approaches such as Wavenet, SaSHMI, and Sample-RNN on a standard dataset for modeling long-term structure. This work gives very exciting direction for the field, given improvements in context modeling that can be scaled with more data, as well as potentially better results by using billions/trillions of parameters.