  In this paper, we propose a new Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) algorithm
called data2vec-aqc, for speech representation learning from unlabeled speech
data. Our goal is to improve SSL for speech in domains where both unlabeled and
labeled data are limited. Building on the recently introduced data2vec, we
introduce additional modules to the data2vec framework that leverage the
benefit of data augmentations, quantized representations, and clustering. The
interaction between these modules helps solve the cross-contrastive loss as an
additional self-supervised objective. data2vec-aqc achieves up to 14.1% and
20.9% relative WER improvement over the existing state-of-the-art data2vec
system over the test-clean and test-other sets, respectively of LibriSpeech,
without the use of any language model (LM). Our proposed model also achieves up
to 17.8\% relative WER gains over the baseline data2vec when fine-tuned on a
subset of the Switchboard dataset. Code:
https://github.com/Speech-Lab-IITM/data2vec-aqc.
