Learning apparatus, method and program

A learning method comprising:

• a spectrogram generation step of causing spectrogram generation circuitry to generate a spectrogram from an input sound signal;
• a patch generation step of causing patch generation circuitry to divide the generated spectrogram to generate a plurality of patches;
• a mask processing step of causing mask processing circuitry to select some patches from among the plurality of patches as masked patches;
• a reconstruction step of causing reconstruction circuitry to obtain a plurality of reconstructed patches by reconstructing the plurality of patches by processing of an encoder and a decoder in a transformer serving as a deep learning model by using visible patches other than the masked patches among the plurality of patches and mask tokens corresponding to the masked patches;
• and
• a parameter update step of causing parameter update circuitry to update a parameter of the encoder and a parameter of the decoder such that the masked patches approach reconstructed patches corresponding to the masked patches among the plurality of reconstructed patches, wherein
• the number of layers of the decoder is three or more.