Demographic Bias in ASR

ASR: Automatic Speech Recognition

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Overview

This field studies how ASR systems perform across accents, dialects, gender, age, ethnicity, and intersecting speaker groups, and how errors affect people who rely on transcription. Researchers use demographic benchmarks and in-the-wild speech, subgroup and intersectional fairness metrics, and representation probes to identify disparities that overall word error rate can hide. Mitigation approaches include balanced data, adversarial training, fairness-aware fine-tuning, and changes to model decoding or compression. Gaps persist across newer systems, while removing demographic information or improving average accuracy does not reliably improve fairness; results can also depend on the metric, dataset, and training seed.

Latest papers

CardsList

31 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, up 50% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. "It Would Make a Geordie Feel at Home": Regional Accent Perceptions and Speech Accommodation in Voice AI

    Oct 27, 2026Dana Serditova, Kevin Tang, Jochen SteffensVoice Agent EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    University of Regensburg, Faculty of Languages, Literature, and Cultures, Department of English and American Studies, Regensburg, 93040, Bavaria, Germany · Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Institute of English and American Studies, Department English Language and Linguistics, Düsseldorf, 40225, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · University of Florida, Department of Linguistics, Gainesville, 32611-5454, Florida, U.S.A. +1

  2. AfriBED: a Speech Recognition Bias Evaluation Dataset for Low Resource African Languages

    Oct 19, 2026Claytone Sikasote, Hussein Suleman, Jan BuysDemographic Bias in ASRASR Evaluation

    Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

  3. How to get the best and fairest performance out of your ASR system using activation steering

    Oct 19, 2026Felix Herron, Alex Colagrande, Solange Rossato +3Activation SteeringAutomatic Speech Recognition

    Univ. de Paris Dauphine (LAMSADE - MILES) · Univ. de Grenoble Alpes (LIG - GETALP)

  4. Connecting the Dots: Enduring Performance Gaps in ASR Systems Between Standard and Minority English Varieties

    Oct 13, 2026Alexander Metzger, Aruna Srivastava, Ruslan Mukhamedvaleev +5Demographic Bias in ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    Koel Labs LLC · University of Texas at Austin · University of Toronto +2

  5. InterCorrect: Intersection-Aware Correction of Demographic Model Merging for Fair ASR

    Oct 6, 2026Ashley E. Bravo-Bravo, Yuchen Zhang, Haralambos Mouratidis +2Demographic Bias in ASRModel Merging

    PUCP · IADS, University of Essex · CSEE, University of Essex +1

  6. Fairness Beyond a Single Run: Training-Seed Variability in Speech LLM Adaptation

    Sep 30, 2026Srishti Ginjala, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Srinivasan ParthasarathyDemographic Bias in ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

  7. Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-LLMs

    Sep 29, 2026Ganesh Pavan Kartikeya Bharadwaj Kolluri, Michael Kampouridis, Ravi ShekharLLM PruningAlgorithmic Fairness

    School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK

  8. Temporal Taxation Compounds Under Post-Training Compression of Whisper Models

    Sep 23, 2026Srishti Ginjala, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Christopher W. Myers +1ASR EvaluationSpeech Foundation Models

    The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA · Air Force Research Laboratory, USA

  9. When Entanglement Lower-Bounds Disparity: Auditing and Repairing Demographic Fairness in Audio Understanding Models

    Sep 23, 2026Kian Shamsaie, Iman ModarressiDisentangled Representation LearningAudio Representation Learning

    People Make Things

  10. Vimarsha: Faithful ASR Evaluation for Indian Languages with Demographic Diversity, In-the-Wild Audio and Spelling Variations

    Sep 21, 2026Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Srija Anand, Sadakopa Ramakrishnan Thothathiri +3ASR EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India · Sarvam AI, India

  11. A Probe Shift Is Not a Fairness Fix: The Limits of Representation Steering in Speech Models

    Sep 16, 2026Nicolas Bourrel, Abderrahmane Issam, Gerasimos SpanakisASR EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    Department of Advanced Computing Sciences Maastricht University

  12. Measuring Fairness in Large Audio Language Models via Semantic-Aware Bias Estimation

    Aug 13, 2026Zhe LiuAudio-Language Model EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    Meta Platforms, Inc. Menlo Park, USA

  13. SamaVaani: Auditing and Debiasing Multilingual Clinical ASR for Indian Languages

    Jun 25, 2026Subham Kumar, Prakrithi Shivaprakash, Abhishek Manoharan +7ASR EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    IIT, Kharagpur · NIMHANS, Bangalore · LGBRIMH, Tezpur

  14. ROMPAR: Morphological Completion and Demographic Unlearning for Romanian-Accented Speech Recognition

    Jun 14, 2026Andrei-Marius Avram, Aureliu-Valentin Antonie, Ştefan-Bogdan Badea +3Adversarial TrainingDemographic Bias in ASR

    National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest, Romania

  15. Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

    Jun 10, 2026Maneesha Rani Saha, Catherine Bao, Neal PatwariASR EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    University of Utah

  16. Speaker Group Encoding in Self-supervised Speech Recognition Models

    Jun 9, 2026Felix Herron, Solange Rossato Alexandre Allauzen, Benoit Favre +1Audio Representation LearningDemographic Bias in ASR

    MILES Team, LAMSADE, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, France (1) · GETALP Team, LIG, Université Grenoble Alpes, France (2) · NLP team, LIS, Aix-Marseille University, France (3)

  17. Your Multimodal Speech Model Says I Have a Face for Radio

    May 28, 2026Maya K. Nachesa, Vlad Niculae, Vagrant GautamASR EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    Language Technology Lab University of Amsterdam · Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies

  18. Responsible Benchmarking of Fairness for Automatic Speech Recognition

    May 11, 2026Felix Herron, Ange Richard, François Portet +2Algorithmic FairnessDemographic Bias in ASR

    MILES Team, LAMSADE, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL (1) · GETALP Team, LIG, Université Grenoble Alpes (2) · PACTE, Université Grenoble-Alpes (3)

  19. Identifying and typifying demographic unfairness in phoneme-level embeddings of self-supervised speech recognition models

    Apr 24, 2026Felix Herron, Solange Rossato, Alexandre Allauzen +1Demographic Bias in ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    MILES Team, LAMSADE, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, France · GETALP Team, LIG, Université Grenoble Alpes, France

  20. Do LLM Decoders Listen Fairly? Benchmarking How Language Model Priors Shape Bias in Speech Recognition

    Apr 23, 2026Srishti Ginjala, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Christopher W. Myers +1ASR EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA · Air Force Research Laboratory, USA

  21. "This Wasn't Made for Me": Recentering User Experience and Emotional Impact in the Evaluation of ASR Bias

    Apr 22, 2026Siyu Liang, Alicia Beckford WassinkAlgorithmic FairnessDemographic Bias in ASR

    University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

  22. Where Do Self-Supervised Speech Models Become Unfair?

    Apr 20, 2026Felix Herron, Maja Hjuler, Solange Rossato +2Speech ProcessingDemographic Bias in ASR

    MILES Team, LAMSADE, Universit´e Paris Dauphine-PSL · GETALP Team, LIG, Universit´e Grenoble Alpes · Queensland University of Technology

  23. Demographic and Linguistic Bias Evaluation in Omnimodal Language Models

    Apr 11, 2026Alaa ElobaidMultimodal Model EvaluationUnified Multimodal Models

    Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  24. "OK Aura, Be Fair With Me": Demographics-Agnostic Training for Bias Mitigation in Wake-up Word Detection

    Apr 7, 2026Fernando López, Paula Delgado-Santos, Pablo Gómez +2Demographic Bias in ASRSpeech Processing

    Telefónica Innovación Digital, Madrid, Spain · Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

  25. Back to Basics: Revisiting ASR in the Age of Voice Agents

    Mar 26, 2026Geeyang Tay, Wentao Ma, Jaewon Lee +8Robust ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    Boson AI

  26. A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition Bias in Newcastle English

    Mar 25, 2026Dana Serditova, Kevin TangDemographic Bias in ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    University of Regensburg, Faculty of Languages, Literature, and Cultures, Department of English and American Studies, Regensburg, 93040, Bavaria, Germany · Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Institute of English and American Studies, Department English Language and Linguistics, Düsseldorf, 40225, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · University of Florida, Department of Linguistics, Gainesville, 32611-5454, Florida, U.S.A.

  27. Beyond Word Error Rate: Auditing the Diversity Tax in Speech Recognition through Dataset Cartography

    Mar 5, 2026Ting-Hui Cheng, Line H. Clemmensen, Sneha DasASR EvaluationDemographic Bias in ASR

    Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark · Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

  28. Bias and Fairness in Self-Supervised Acoustic Representations for Cognitive Impairment Detection

    Mar 3, 2026Kashaf Gulzar, Korbinian Riedhammer, Elmar Nöth +2Speech-Based Dementia DetectionClinical Speech Processing

    Zentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (KIZ), Technische Hochschule Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany · Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

  29. ACES: Accent Subspaces for Coupling, Explanations, and Stress-Testing in Automatic Speech Recognition

    Feb 28, 2026Swapnil ParekhDemographic Bias in ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    Intuit

  30. Dialect and Gender Bias in YouTube's Spanish Captioning System

    Feb 27, 2026Iris Dania Jimenez, Christoph KernDemographic Bias in ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    Department of Statistics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany. · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany.