From Masking to Merging: Rethinking SpecAugment for Efficient Audio Spectrogram Transformer

Minhee Park, Hyowon Ahn, Chanwoo Kim

This paper proposes SpecAugment-Patch Merging, a simple yet effective method to accelerate Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) training. We first apply SpecAugment to mask input sp…