Semi-Orthogonal Low-Rank Matrix Factorization for Deep Neural Networks

Time Delay Neural Networks (TDNNs), also known as one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1-d CNNs), are an efficient and well-performing neural network architecture for speech recognition. We introduce a factored form of TDNNs (TDNN-F) which is structurally the same as a TDNN whose layers have been compressed via SVD, but is trained from a random start with one of the two factors of each matrix constrained to be semi-orthogonal. This gives substantial improvements over TDNNs and performs about as well as TDNN-LSTM hybrids.