Modules 01-02
Speech ML/AI work depends on fundamentals: tensor shapes, losses, gradients, optimization, train/validation discipline, and debugging instincts that transfer from toy models to ASR, TTS, and speech agents.
Study companion: open the NotebookLM review artifact
Core Math
A strong engineer can explain the objective before opening a profiler. These foundations show up in acoustic modeling, language modeling, speaker embeddings, retrieval, ranking, and production calibration.
Audio batches are tensors: batch, time, feature, channel, layer, head, and vocabulary axes must stay explicit.
Many tensor libraries broadcast silently. A wrong axis can produce plausible numbers while training the wrong objective. Experienced engineers write shape comments, assertions, and tests for feature extraction, masking, padding, and batch collation.
ASR and TTS systems rank uncertain hypotheses, not certainties. Learn likelihoods, priors, calibration, and confidence.
Confidence is a model score or derived probability. Accuracy is measured against labels. A model can be overconfident on noisy microphones or rare names, so launch decisions require calibration curves and slice metrics, not raw confidence alone.
Cross entropy, CTC, contrastive losses, regression losses, and ranking losses encode different supervision assumptions.
Cross entropy fits aligned classification targets. Streaming ASR often has unaligned audio and text, so CTC or transducer losses marginalize alignments. Retrieval uses contrastive objectives, and TTS may combine duration, acoustic, adversarial, and vocoder losses.
Learning rate, batch size, initialization, normalization, clipping, and schedulers determine whether gradients are useful.
Check data labels, leakage, feature normalization, loss scale, gradient norms, learning rate, batch construction, masking, train/eval mode, random seeds, and whether the model can overfit a tiny batch. Most early failures are pipeline failures.
Training Loop
This tiny example is not an ASR system. It is a clean template for habits that matter later: explicit shapes, split metrics, seeded fixtures, and small-batch overfit checks.
import random
import numpy as np
import torch
from torch import nn
def seed_everything(seed=7):
random.seed(seed)
np.random.seed(seed)
torch.manual_seed(seed)
if torch.cuda.is_available():
torch.cuda.manual_seed_all(seed)
mps = getattr(torch, "mps", None)
mps_backend = getattr(torch.backends, "mps", None)
if (
mps is not None
and mps_backend is not None
and hasattr(mps, "manual_seed")
and mps_backend.is_available()
):
mps.manual_seed(seed)
class TinyClassifier(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, in_features, hidden, classes):
super().__init__()
self.net = nn.Sequential(
nn.Linear(in_features, hidden),
nn.ReLU(),
nn.LayerNorm(hidden),
nn.Linear(hidden, classes),
)
def forward(self, x):
# x: [batch, features]
return self.net(x)
def train_step(model, batch, optimizer):
model.train()
x, y = batch
logits = model(x)
assert logits.shape[0] == y.shape[0]
loss = nn.functional.cross_entropy(logits, y)
optimizer.zero_grad(set_to_none=True)
loss.backward()
torch.nn.utils.clip_grad_norm_(model.parameters(), max_norm=1.0)
optimizer.step()
return float(loss.detach())If the model cannot drive loss near zero on a handful of examples, something basic is broken: labels, shapes, masking, optimizer, feature scale, loss wiring, or train/eval mode. This test is cheap and catches failures before expensive experiments.
Replace fixed vectors with frames or learned audio tokens, add padding masks, and choose a sequence objective. The same discipline remains: verify tensor axes, loss behavior, gradient scale, split metrics, seeded fixtures, and a small overfit run. Seeds reduce run-to-run noise; on Apple Silicon, seed MPS explicitly when the installed PyTorch version exposes the MPS RNG helper. Exact determinism can still vary across PyTorch releases, hardware, kernels, and distributed training settings.
Evaluation
You have recordings from 500 speakers, multiple rooms, and several microphone models. How do you split train, validation, and test data?
Split primarily by speaker so identity does not leak. Reserve device and room slices in validation and test, and keep a time-based holdout if recordings were collected over multiple app versions. Report false accepts, false rejects, latency, and noisy/far-field slices. Use a locked test set only for release decisions, not iterative tuning.
Offline validation accuracy increased, but users report worse dictation quality after release. What hypotheses do you test first?
Check data mismatch, leakage in validation, degraded latency, partial transcript churn, punctuation or normalization changes, entity error rate, accent or device slices, confidence calibration, rollout mix, and downstream UI behavior. Product quality may depend on timing, stability, and edit distance on important words, not global accuracy alone.
Debugging
Start with labels, feature scale, learning rate, frozen parameters, masking, and optimizer wiring.
Overfit 8 to 32 examples with augmentation disabled. If that fails, inspect one batch by hand, print shapes, check logits, check gradients, and confirm labels match the input examples.
Look for overfitting, leakage removal, train/eval mismatch, bad augmentation, or slice-specific failures.
Speakers, microphones, rooms, language mix, noise, silence, and transcript normalization can shift independently. A validation set that misses one of those axes can approve a model that fails in production.
Study Companion
Use the shared NotebookLM artifact as a companion review for this foundations module when you want an alternate summary or study guide before working through the prompts.
Open the shared NotebookLM review artifact
Inline podcast playback can be added here when there is a direct public WAV or MP3 URL. The NotebookLM artifact link opens the NotebookLM page, but it is not itself an embeddable audio file.
Advanced Practice
A candidate model underfits clean speech and performs poorly on noisy speech. Explain what you would change and how you would measure it.
Separate capacity from data mismatch. Underfitting clean speech suggests optimization, architecture, feature, or capacity issues. Poor noisy performance may require augmentation, better data coverage, denoising, or robust objectives. Measure clean and noisy slices separately, include entity error and latency, and require a baseline comparison before shipping.
Offline eval is strong, but production requests show lower confidence and higher correction rate. What do you inspect?
Compare sample rate, channel handling, loudness normalization, VAD, text normalization, tokenizer version, model artifact hash, dependency versions, padding and masks, runtime precision, feature extraction config, traffic slices, and client microphone changes. Add canaries that run the same public fixture through training and serving paths.