Automatic Speech Recognition
Also known as ASR
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54 papers in the last four weeks, up 238% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.
Latest papers 302
Technical lectures mix Mandarin speech with English technical terms. These terms carry the core meaning of the lecture, yet they occupy few characters. Character error rate (CER) therefore hides their recognition failures. We study whether lecture context helps recognize these terms. We build a term-rich Mandarin AI/ML lecture benchmark, and we define term-centric metrics that measure technical-term recognition directly. We then propose a two-pass, reference-free decoding method. The first pass runs segment-only ASR. We extract the most frequent technical terms from the first-pass hypotheses, and we prompt the recognizer with this self-built glossary in the second pass. Across five ASR backbones, the first-pass glossary raises term recall for every model and holds or lowers CER on all five. On Breeze-ASR-25 it lifts term recall from 52.50% to 60.13% while lowering CER, and a hybrid that adds a small external term list reaches 62.05% recall and 82.73% term precision. Lecture context, recovered from the model's own output, is a practical signal for technical-term recognition. Term-centric evaluation exposes errors that CER misses.
Listen, Think, Transcribe: Continuous Latent Test-Time Scaling for ASR
End-to-end ASR models transcribe in a single pass, leaving no room for the decoder to revisit hard inputs. We propose LatentASR, a parameter-efficient method that adds continuous latent test-time scaling to a frozen ASR backbone. Two small trainable modules drive it: a Latent Adapter that iteratively refines a few latent prefix positions through bounded, stabilized updates, and a Value Head that predicts whether extra computation will help and halts the loop early. The Qwen3-ASR-0.6B backbone stays fully frozen, and we train only ~4M extra parameters. We activate this loop with a deliberately small, diverse 500-utterance training set. Under this minimal-data regime, standard adaptation methods all regress: full fine-tuning, LoRA, and prompt tuning each increase WER. LatentASR is the only tested method that reduces WER on both clean benchmarks (FLEURS -2.54% and VoxPopuli -0.47% relative). The reductions are concentrated on intrinsically hard inputs. On accented and code-switched speech (ASCEND), LatentASR achieves a 16.0% relative CER reduction. Across 30 FLEURS languages (23,049 utterances), the multilingual WER decreases uniformly across resource tiers, confirming that the adapter generalizes without overfitting. Dynamic halting preserves most of the clean-set reduction at a fraction of the compute, skipping roughly half of all utterances at the entry gate. Our results show that a small, carefully chosen activation set can switch on test-time scaling inside a frozen ASR model without corrupting the model itself, converting fixed per-utterance compute into input-dependent compute where it is most needed.
S-DiverSe: Spanish Diverse Speech
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has advanced remarkably for standard speech, yet speech affected by neurological conditions remains a challenge. We present S-DiverSe (Spanish Diverse Speech), a corpus of 3.2 hours of in-the-wild Spanish speech from 22 speakers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and stroke. The dataset contains 444 manually transcribed audio segments with metadata on speaker sex, disease type, and intelligibility. S-DiverSe is designed to support ASR evaluation and development for neurologically affected Spanish speech. We describe the dataset, analyze its composition, and report baseline ASR results alongside initial adaptation experiments. Our findings reveal that heuristic text post-processing is more robust than fine-tuning for out-of-domain neurological Spanish speech. This underscores the need for dedicated in-the-wild Spanish benchmarks.
Reinforcement Learning for Data-Efficient Code-Switched ASR
Audio-language models can be prompted for code-switched speech, but their decoding is not optimized for code-switching and often fails at language boundaries. We propose a practical reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards recipe for data-efficient adaptation of audio-language models to code-switched ASR using group relative policy optimization, combining an error rate reward with a script fidelity reward that penalizes wrong writing systems and a two-pass draft-and-refinement procedure. Using Qwen2-Audio as a reproducible testbed across 10 language pairs, training on only TTS code-switched speech, we show that RLVR with 10% of the data matches LoRA supervised fine-tuning trained on the full dataset, with the largest gains on typologically distant pairs. The error rate reward eliminates translation errors while the script fidelity reward separately reduces script contamination without degradation. These gains transfer zero-shot to a human-recorded code-switching corpus.
NAVER LABS Europe Submission to the Instruction-following 2026 Short Track
In this paper, we describe NAVER LABS Europe's submission to the instruction-following speech processing short track at IWSLT 2026. We participate again in the constrained setting, developing systems capable of jointly performing ASR, ST, and SQA from English speech into Chinese, Italian, and German. Building on our previous submission, ranked first in last year's short track, we update our multi-stage training pipeline by replacing the speech projector with SpeechMapper, a method for learning a speech-to-LLM embedding projector using only ASR data. In addition, we introduce a synthetic SQA dataset, fakACL, composed of artificially generated scientific presentations. This dataset is built by prompting the LLM backbone, segmenting the generated talks, and synthesizing speech with SeamlessM4T-large-v2. The combination of an improved speech projection mechanism and domain-specific synthetic data allows our model to outperform last year's best short-track system, while being considerably more compact and relying on a weaker LLM backbone. This year's results place our system tied for first place in the overall short track ranking.
Rethinking Speech-LLM Integration for ASR: Effective Joint Speech-Text Training by Interleaving
Speech-LLM integration has shown promising results by leveraging extensive textual pretraining, yet its specific benefits for automatic speech recognition (ASR) remain unclear. We observe that as supervised ASR training data increases, the contribution of LLM priors becomes less evident, and simple speech-text joint training under-utilizes textual knowledge. We therefore propose Joint Speech-Text Interleaved Pretraining (JSTIP), an ASR-oriented pretraining strategy that constructs word-level and segment-level interleaved speech-text sequences within aligned pairs for speech-LLM architectures that accept continuous inputs. Experiments on 38k hours of ASR data show consistent entity accuracy improvement compared to ASR-only and joint speech-text training baselines. JSTIP achieves on-par entity recognition performance using domain transcription text compared to synthetic speech-text pairs, simplifying domain adaptation. Benefiting from textual pretraining and domain text data, JSTIP is competitive with open-source ASR and Speech-LLM systems in medical entity recognition. The zero-shot speech question answering behaviors further suggest that interleaving reduces the speech-text modality gap and preserves the LLM generative prior, which is likely the reason for the entity improvements on the ASR task.
H-SAGE: Holistic Speaker-Aware Guided Experts for MoE-based Multi-Talker ASR
Multi-talker Automatic Speech Recognition (MTASR) faces significant challenges in accurately transcribing overlapping speech, particularly under complex high-overlap conditions. While recent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approaches have shown promise, they typically rely on frame-independent routing that leads to temporal myopia, and depend solely on the downstream ASR objective, which results in implicit and ungrounded representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose Holistic Speaker-Aware Guided Experts (H-SAGE) for MoE-based MTASR. Specifically, we introduce a Speaker-Aware Global Encoder to capture long-term dependencies, supervised by an auxiliary Overlap-Aware Loss that explicitly guides the model to discern acoustic states. Furthermore, we design a Holistic Gating Mechanism to arbitrate expert selection by jointly evaluating global context and local details. Experiments on LibriSpeechMix demonstrate that H-SAGE achieves consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly in complex scenarios, validating that explicit acoustic guidance effectively enhances expert collaboration. Our code can be found at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/H-SAGE.
Adapting Foundation ASR Models to Dysarthric Speech: A Case Study
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often perform poorly in dysarthric speech, limiting their usefulness to affected speakers in everyday communication. This paper presents a personalized ASR system for a dysarthric speaker, built by adapting a foundation ASR model to speaker-specific data. Using the TEQST tool, we collected 92 hours of read speech and later added 8.8 hours of user corrections gathered through a deployed mobile application. Starting from Whisper, fine-tuning reduced word error rate to 15.8% with only 1.4 hours of adaptation data, reached 10.7% with 22.5 hours, and achieved the best result of 9.7% when using all available data including the corrections. Using LoRA adaptation and/or Qwen3-ASR as foundation model performed worse in this setting. The results show that personalized fine-tuning can make foundation ASR models substantially more effective for dysarthric speech and suitable for practical deployment.
Tone-Conditioned Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Bantu Speech Recognition
Southern Bantu languages are spoken by over 80 million people, yet current foundation ASR models still produce zero-shot WER above 100%, which limits practical use in education and public services. We addressed this gap with a tone conditioned curriculum framework for 6 Southern Bantu languages that combined hybrid difficulty scoring, gated adapters driven by tonal statistics and staged curriculum training. We trained on a community corpus and tested transfer to NCHLT to measure robustness beyond matched evaluation. Results revealed clear interactions between architecture and language, with W2V-BERT outperforming Whisper on Nguni languages by 3 to 4 WER points whilst Whisper performed better on Sotho-Tswana languages. W2V-BERT with tone conditioning reached 28.41% average WER across datasets and 23.79% on Xitsonga transfer. No single model suited all 6 languages, so deployment should pair model selection per language with validation across corpora.
Building an ASR Solution for Training and Assessing Children's Reading
Automatic speech recognition for children's reading remains underdeveloped for most African languages, including Bambara, despite its potential value for reproducible literacy assessment. We present an open-source system for assessing children's reading in Bambara, developed through an end-to-end process linking field data collection, benchmark construction, model adaptation, a reading application, and classroom validation. A mobile collection and assessment app was used to collect 55 hours of raw reading speech from 60 children, from which we construct a public benchmark for Bambara child-reading assessment. Fine-tuning experiments compare Soloni, a Bambara-adapted Fast-Conformer ASR framework with TDT and CTC decoders, with QuartzNet, a compact convolutional ASR architecture. The best Soloni model reduces WER from 0.42 to 0.22 and CER from 0.15 to 0.08, substantially outperforming QuartzNet on the isolated benchmark. The experiments further show that repeated readings of the same texts provide architecture-dependent benefits: they substantially improve QuartzNet but add only marginal gains for Soloni, while SpecAugment regulates training without exceeding the best unaugmented configuration. Disaggregated analysis identifies children under 10 as the main source of residual errors, motivating targeted collection from younger readers. Ten classroom trials supported continued use of the application.
What Counts as an Error? Dual-Reference Benchmarking for Atypical ASR
ASR systems have been often reported to underperform on atypical speech. An often conflated compounding factor is the existence of two valid transcription references: verbatim (actual produced speech, including repetitions/prolongations) and intended (the canonical form of the text with disfluencies removed) in atypical speech recognition depending on context and use-case. Most ASR evaluations conflate this duality into a single ground truth and reward systems that delete disfluencies, ignoring verbatim faithfulness. We benchmark 11 ASR models from encoder-decoder, CTC and transducer families using both verbatim and intended references on atypical stuttered speech as a case study. Our quantitative assessment underlines the disparity in model performance and rankings using the two transcript styles. Through this analysis, we highlight the importance of selecting a suitable transcription reference for valid model selection depending on the use-case, particularly for atypical ASR.
Comparing Human and Automatic Recognition of Dutch Dysarthric Continuous Speech: A Case Study
In our goal to develop personalised dysarthric speech recognition (DSR) models, this study compared the recognition performances of human listeners and those of three state-of-the-art, off-the-shelf ASR systems (Whisper-large-V3, Google Chirp 3, and Omnilingual) on the recognition of Dutch continuous read and spontaneous speech from a single speaker with severe dysarthria. Results showed that both humans listeners and the three off-the-shelf ASR systems exhibit word error rates (WER) exceeding 70% on average, indicating that DSR is highly challenging for both humans and ASR systems. Fine-tuning on the dysarthric speech significantly reduced WER. Although overall WERs are still quite high (>23%), the personalised DSR models outperformed the human listeners, and performance is getting closer to being useful for supporting day-to-day communication of dysarthric speakers. Future research should focus on improving personalized DSR on spontaneous speech and longer utterances in the case of read speech, with a specific focus on particular phonemes.
VIB-AVSR: Variational Information Bottleneck for Noise-Robust LLM-Based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition
Audio-Visual Speech Recognition takes two input modalities, acoustic and visual streams, where visual information from lip movements aids recognition when audio is noisy. Recently, LLM-based AVSR models have emerged as a promising paradigm by connecting pre-trained audio-visual encoders to an LLM, achieving strong results in clean conditions. However, these models are predominantly optimized for clean acoustic conditions, with limited attention to making the LLM backbone robust to noise. No explicit mechanism is employed to produce stable representations under corrupted audio, leading to performance degradation in noisy environments. To address this, we propose VIB-AVSR, which integrates Variational Information Bottleneck layers at targeted positions within the LLM backbone to regularize representations. VIB-AVSR reduces degradation under noisy conditions across multiple SNR levels and noise types, without requiring architectural modifications or additional training data.
Preference-ASR: A Preference-Aware Test Set for Benchmarking ASR in the Era of Speech LLMs
Popular ASR test sets adopt inconsistent conventions for numbers, disfluencies, entities, and casing, while standard normalizers erase the format distinctions users care about. Current benchmarks therefore cannot measure whether a model follows user preferences for output style. We introduce PreferenceASR, a test set evaluating ASR systems on their ability to follow natural-language preference instructions across four categories: normalization, entities, disfluencies, and case. Built from seven open-source corpora via a two-stage LLM-assisted pipeline with human verification, it is evaluated with a preference-aware normalizer that selectively skips steps matching the active instruction. Benchmarking four models shows rankings shift across preference types, exposing quality differences traditional evaluation obscures. We publicly release the dataset.
Position-Aware Target Speaker Extraction for Long-Form Multi-Party Conversations: A Diarization-Free Framework for ASR
In long-form multi-party conversations, highly imbalanced speaker activity and frequent overlap make it difficult to identify "who spoke when and what". Sliding-window continuous speech separation (CSS) mitigates sparse supervision, but often suffers from cross-window speaker inconsistency and residual crosstalk, which in practice requires diarization for reliable speaker attribution. Motivated by the stability of speakers' directions of arrival (DOAs) in meetings, we propose PATSE, a multi-channel Position-Aware Target Speaker Extraction front-end that uses DOA as a spatial prior to directly extract the speech of each target speaker. PATSE combines a DOA-guided spatial encoder and conditioner to generate speaker-attributed streams, from which speaker activity can be inferred via simple post-processing (e.g., VAD) without explicit diarization. Experiments on both replayed and real conversations show consistent ASR gains outperforming CSS and diarization-based pipelines.
How to Leverage Synthetic Speech for LLM-Based ASR Systems?
In regulated domains such as banking and healthcare, where privacy constraints make real speech costly to collect and retain, synthetic speech from modern text-to-speech (TTS) is an appealing alternative for training automatic speech recognition (ASR) without exposing sensitive customer recordings. Yet a persistent distributional gap between synthetic and real data limits how far it can replace genuine recordings. Prior work largely treats this gap as a black box to be engineered around, but in our work, we instead examine its origin directly by probing a SLAM-ASR architecture. Then, we localise where its LLM backbone separates real from synthetic speech and find the discriminative signal concentrated in the early-to-middle layers, where temporal and prosodic perturbations disrupt it most. We further show that representation-level separability, help, but does not directly predict downstream ASR gains. On the other hand, convolving synthetic audio with room impulse responses (RIRs) narrows the gap not by making synthetic speech sound cleaner or more natural, but by reproducing the acoustic irregularities of real recordings. Translating these findings into the training procedure, by adding a layer-selection module combined with RIR augmentation matches a fully real-data baseline using only 25% of the real speech (13.6h) and surpasses it at all higher proportions.
Clustering Unsupervised Representations as Defense against Poisoning Attacks on Speech Commands Classification System
Poisoning attacks entail attackers intentionally tampering with training data. In this paper, we consider a dirty-label poisoning attack scenario on a speech commands classification system. The threat model assumes that certain utterances from one of the classes (source class) are poisoned by superimposing a trigger on it, and its label is changed to another class selected by the attacker (target class). We propose a filtering defense against such an attack. First, we use DIstillation with NO labels (DINO) to learn unsupervised representations for all the training examples. Next, we use K-means and LDA to cluster these representations. Finally, we keep the utterances with the most repeated label in their cluster for training and discard the rest. For a 10% poisoned source class, we demonstrate a drop in attack success rate from 99.75% to 0.25%. We test our defense against a variety of threat models, including different target and source classes, as well as trigger variations.
Improving Large-Scale Weakly Supervised ASR by Filtering and Selection
Leveraging large-scale weakly supervised datasets is crucial to train robust end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models. However, such datasets often contain noisy labels and lack domain specificity, limiting their effectiveness. To address these issues and make better use of weakly supervised datasets, we propose a novel training approach incorporating data filtering and selection. Our approach consists of three steps: pretraining on the entire dataset, continued pretraining on a filtered subset based on character error rate (CER), and fine-tuning on a small number of acoustically similar samples to the target domain, selected from the filtered subset. In experiments with a 90,000-hour weakly supervised Japanese dataset, the proposed filtering and selection methods synergistically reduced CER by up to 6.4% and 4.0%, respectively, even though these steps reused training samples already used in the first pretraining step.
What Was That Again? Certified Robustness for Automatic Speech Recognition
Automatic Speech Recognition systems are notoriously both sensitive to adversarial and benign perturbations. While this has been repeatedly demonstrated using reference datasets, detecting such behaviors in deployed systems is incredibly challenging, due to the absence of oracle knowledge of the true transcription. We demonstrate that employing a certification-inspired mechanism can significantly decrease WER, increase recall, and decrease the Spearman correlation between confidence and WER. We achieve this through a dual-gate diagnostic pipeline: a Two-Sided Atomic Audit that accumulates statistical wealth to certify both token existence and adversarial exclusion, and a Rank-Based Tournament that selects the winning sequence. Our evaluations across four diverse architectures demonstrate up to a 55% relative reduction in Word Error Rate, while also providing granular word- and sentence-level certifications to enhance acoustic security.
SamaVaani: Auditing and Debiasing Multilingual Clinical ASR for Indian Languages
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used to document clinical encounters, yet its reliability in multilingual and demographically diverse Indian healthcare context remains largely unknown. In this study, we first conduct the systematic audit of ASR performance on real-world psychiatric interview data spanning Kannada, Hindi and Indian English, comparing eight state-of-the-art models including IndicWhisper, WhisperLargeV3, Sarvam, GoogleS2T, Gemma3n, OmniLingual, Vaani, and Gemini. Our results reveal substantial variability across models and languages, with some systems performing competitively in Indian English but failing in regional speech. We further fine-tune two of the best performing opensource models, i.e., Gemma3n and OmniLingual, using various methods. With this, we uncover systematic performance gaps tied to speaker role and gender, raising concerns about equitable deployment in clinical settings, which are further mitigated by fairness-aware fine-tuning. To this end, we propose SamaVaani, a unified debiasing technique that simultaneously improves ASR performance and improves fairness across demographic groups.
Enhancing BEST-RQ Pseudo-Label Quality through Online Refinement for Automatic Speech Recognition
BEST-RQ is a simple and effective self-supervised training method for speech representation learning that performs well on automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. It generates pseudolabels using a fixed online quantization scheme, which simplifies training but provides weaker supervision than HuBERT-style models that iteratively refine pseudo-labels. In this work, we improve online pseudo-label generation while preserving simplicity. We propose three modifications: replacing the quantizer's linear projection with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), updating the codebook via iterative codebook refinement, and introducing an additional codebook updated via codebook distillation. We pre-train on the LibriSpeech 960-hour dataset and fine-tune using 100 hours of supervised LibriSpeech data. With all three modifications enabled, we achieve a 12% relative reduction in word error rate (WER) on the LibriSpeech test-other set, improving from 10.1% to 8.8%.
Phoneme-Level Mispronunciation Screening in Polish-Speaking Children with an Explainable Assistant
Early identification of speech sound errors in children is often limited by access to specialists, motivating lightweight screening tools that can operate outside the clinic. We present a screening pipeline for Polish-speaking children focused on sibilant substitutions, coupling a wav2vec2-based CTC token recognizer with alignment-based error typing and a template-grounded caregiver assistant for screening, not diagnosis. On a held-out test set of 10 unseen children comprising 559 utterances, the recognizer achieves 88.7 percent exact sequence match. As a conservative screening proxy, we flag a mismatch when the system emits substitution-evidence bracketed tokens at the target segment, yielding 72.9 percent precision, 61.4 percent recall, F1 = 0.67, and a 2.7 percent false-alarm rate on target-correct items. We describe the assistant's safety boundaries and outline a clinician-in-the-loop validation plan for future deployment.
Progressive Alignment Objectives for Aligner-Encoder based ASR
Aligner-Encoders are recently proposed seq2seq end-to-end ASR models that replace decoder attention by predicting the uth token directly from the u-th encoder position, so the encoder must learn the alignment internally without cross-attention or a transducer lattice. In practice, this alignment often forms abruptly in the upper layers, making training sensitive and brittle on long utterances. We propose InterAligner, which adds an intermediate Aligner objective so alignment can form progressively across depth, together with an intermediate CTC loss (InterCTC) to stabilize optimization. On LibriSpeech with a 17-layer Conformer, a final-only Aligner reaches 5.0/7.8 WER (test-clean/other). InterCTC improves to 3.4/6.0, and InterAligner further reduces WER to 3.1/5.6 with the largest gains on long utterances.
A Fusion-Aware Two-Stage Framework for Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis in Low-Resource Modern Standard Arabic
Accurate phoneme recognition is pivotal for mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) in modern standard Arabic (MSA), yet remains constrained by data scarcity and the synthetic-real domain gap. This work proposes a two-stage end-to-end framework. It integrates a pre-trained encoder with causal dilated temporal convolutional networks to preserve fine-grained phonetic variations. A hierarchical two-stage strategy first learns general mappings from native/synthetic corpora, then adapts to scarce real learner data to mitigate domain shift without over-correction. Prediction stability is further enhanced via multi-checkpoint ensemble inference with N-gram rescoring. Evaluated on the QuranMB.v2 test set, our system achieves an F1-score of , a % relative improvement over baseline (). This performance ranks at the top of the IqraEval.2 Challenge, establishing a new state-of-the-art for low-resource MSA in MDD.
From Text Metrics to Model Internals: A Study of Whisper ASR Hallucination Detection
Hallucinations of ASR models - fluent transcriptions with no basis in audio - degrade system performance and pose risks in downstream applications. Robust detection of such errors remains a challenge. This paper studies Whisper large v3 hallucination detection on real-speech human-annotated data across three paradigms: text-based, LLM-based, and internal decoder state probing. Text classifiers utilizing metrics for text evaluation achieve high recall but degrade without reference transcripts. LLM-based detection improves precision with domain-specific prompt conditioning, yet remains less competitive than the lightweight text-based methods. Probing Whisper's decoder representations, without a ground-truth reference, yields the strongest performance, revealing that hallucination traits are encoded across intermediate decoding layers. A late-fusion meta-classifier combining text and internal-state outputs achieves the best overall detection performance.
HALAS: A Human-Annotated Dataset of Hallucinations of Modern ASR Systems
End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems hallucinate on natural speech, yet existing mitigation methods are typically evaluated on non-speech or artificially corrupted audio. We introduce HALAS, the first human-annotated dataset of naturally occurring hallucinations from seven state-of-the-art ASR models on real unprocessed earnings call recordings. HALAS provides span-level labels, enabling analysis of hallucination patterns and their severity. Our analysis reveals strong cross-model vocabulary overlap and confirms that hallucinations also occur for almost correctly transcribed speech (characterized by a low Word Error Rate). The proposed benchmark with HALAS shows that the character and semantic-level metrics used as a proxy for hallucination detection reach 81% ROC-AUC, while state-of-the-art detection methods achieve an F1 score of only 53.1%. As such, HALAS establishes the first rigorous non-artificial benchmark for the detection and mitigation of ASR hallucinations.
Scaling Audio Models Efficiently: Joint Optimization of Scale, Resolution, Adaptation, Precision, and Sparsity
Large automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper must be deployed across hardware with widely varying memory and inference-speed constraints. We present a compression framework that jointly parametrizes Whisper deployment along \emph{six} dimensions: model size, temporal resolution, encoder token stride, low-rank adaptation capacity, weight precision and sparsity pattern. All axes are jointly optimized using NSGA-III with respect to three deployment objectives: word error rate (WER), inference FLOPs, and memory footprint. Across 50 of the 1,680 candidate configurations evaluated, we characterize the conditional effect of each axis and identify compression combinations that dominate naive single-axis scaling, while finding that 1:4 structured sparsity fails to recover acceptable accuracy under the tested recovery budgets. We report measured WER and resident memory, use analytical EffFLOPs as the search-time compute surrogate, and separately validate representative inference configurations using measured real-time factor (RTF).
ATCCaps: A Call-Sign-Aware Speech Dataset for Air Traffic Control Recognition
Call signs are safety-critical entities in air traffic control (ATC) communications because they identify the target aircraft of each spoken instruction. This paper presents ATCCaps, a call-sign-aware ATC speech dataset with caption-level audio-text supervision. Built from real ATC radiotelephony recordings, ATCCaps contains 202.94 hours of curated audio, 170,385 utterances, and 922 unique normalized call signs. The construction pipeline combines confidence-aware transcript parsing, ADS-B-derived call-sign metadata, call-sign normalization, rule-based quality filtering, and LLM-assisted caption generation. Each retained sample is paired with transcript descriptions, call-sign descriptions, and ATC-style captions, supporting ASR evaluation, call-sign matching, and call-sign-aware audio-text retrieval. We further characterize ATCCaps through split statistics, call-sign coverage, seen/unseen call-sign analysis, filtering audits, and caption quality evaluation. The evaluation subset is derived from the human-annotated ATCO2-test-set, enabling reference evaluation with manual transcripts. Results show that ATCCaps provides scalable audio-grounded call-sign supervision, while caption analysis highlights the need to explicitly validate call-sign and numeric fidelity. Reference ASR and CLAP-based baselines demonstrate the usability of ATCCaps for call-sign-aware ATC speech modeling.
From Speech to Text Corpora: Evaluating ASR-Based Data Acquisition for Low-Resource Fongbe and Hausa
Low-resource African languages lack text corpora needed for language model training. We investigate whether ASR pipelines can extend text resources for two typologically distinct West African languages: Fongbe (tonal, diacritic-rich) and Hausa (non-tonal). We fine-tune MMS-300M on a curated 12.3-hour Fongbe dataset, achieving 9.48% WER on the ALFFA benchmark - a 78% relative reduction from the prior 44.04% baseline - while preserving tonal diacritics critical to the language. For Hausa, we apply an existing fine-tuned Whisper-Small model. We catalog 1,553 YouTube videos (236 hours) and process a subset of 424 videos (45.49 hours) selected to balance domain diversity with available computational resources, producing 6,770 transcribed segments. Human evaluation on 50 randomly sampled segments per language shows mean quality scores of 57.4/100 for Hausa and 36.5/100 for Fongbe, indicating that while Hausa transcriptions approach acceptable quality for corpus construction, Fongbe transcriptions require post-processing or improved models for production use. We release the curated dataset, fine-tuned model, transcribed corpus, and full video catalog following platform terms and ethical guidelines.
Adding Robust Code-Switching Capabilities to High Performance Multilingual ASR
Code-switching (CSW) remains challenging for large multi-lingual ASR systems in real-world deployment. While fine-tuning on synthetic CSW data is possible, it generally degrades strong monolingual baselines. Our goal is to preserve these capabilities while extending models to handle complex code-switching, including morphological variations across languages. We propose Bayesian factorized adaptation, which learns to efficiently integrate switching-relevant knowledge into strong pretrained models without overwriting existing capabilities. Requiring only a small amount of synthetic data, our approach reduces transcription errors by 32.87% on code-switched words while improving overall WER by 5.31%, all while maintaining mono-lingual performance. Our results demonstrate that effective CSW adaptation depends more on knowledge integration than data complexity.