TadaStride: Using time adaptive strides in audio data for effective downsampling

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In this paper, we introduce a new downsampling method for audio data called TadaStride, which can adaptively adjust the downsampling ratios across an audio data instance. Unlike previous methods using a fixed downsampling ratio, TadaStride can preserve more information from task-relevant parts of a data instance by using smaller strides for those parts and larger strides for less relevant parts. Additionally, we also introduce TadaStride-F, which is developed as a more efficient version of TadaStride while maintaining minimal performance loss. In experiments, we evaluate our TadaStride, primarily focusing on a range of audio processing tasks. Firstly, in audio classification experiments, TadaStride and TadaStride-F outperform other widely used standard downsampling methods, even with comparable memory and time usage. Furthermore, through various analyses, we provide an understanding of how TadaStride learns effective adaptive strides and how it leads to improved performance. In addition, through additional experiments on automatic speech recognition and discrete speech representation learning, we demonstrate that TadaStride and TadaStride-F consistently outperform other downsampling methods and examine how the adaptive strides are learned in these tasks.