Mahi Luthra, Jiayi Shen, Maxime Poli, Angelo Ortiz Tandazo, Yosuke Higuchi, Youssef Benchekroun, Martin Gleize, Charles-Éric Saint-James, Dongyan Lin, Phillip Rust, Angel Villar-Corrales, Surya, Vanessa Stark, Rashel Moritz, Juan Pino, Yann LeCun, Emmanuel Dupoux. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

This paper introduces MauBERT, a multilingual extension of HuBERT that leverages articulatory features for robust cross-lingual phonetic representation learning. We continue HuBERT pre-training with supervision based on a phonetic-to-articulatory feature mapping in 55 languages. Our models learn from multilingual data to predict articulatory features or phones, resulting in language-independent representations that capture multilingual phonetic properties. Through comprehensive ABX discriminability testing, we show MauBERT models produce more context-invariant representations than state-of-the-art multilingual self-supervised learning models. Additionally, the models effectively adapt to unseen languages and casual speech with minimal self-supervised fine-tuning (10 hours of speech). This establishes an effective approach for instilling linguistic inductive biases in self-supervised speech models.