The paper introduces a new benchmark of 13,044 spontaneous Nepali‑English code‑switched podcast utterances, totaling 15.45 h, and evaluates a two‑stage synthetic‑to‑real adaptation framework for ASR. Stage 1 uses supervised fine‑tuning on 0.95 h of synthetic speech, reducing Mixed Error Rate from 23.40 % to 21.52 % and switch‑point error rate from 35.89 % to 28.77 %. Stage 2 applies Group Relative Policy Optimization with script and transcription rewards, yielding modest but statistically significant further improvements, particularly in English script confusion and switch‑point accuracy. The study also shows that an auxiliary script reward term offers no benefit beyond MER‑only optimization in this setting, and that the synthetic SFT provides the main cross‑domain transfer to spontaneous human speech.
By Firoj Paudel
arXiv:2609.09554v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. L...
By Shivam Singh, Aditya Yadavalli, Catherine Arnett, Alex Warstadt
The paper introduces a unified phoneme‑based TTS‑to‑ASR augmentation pipeline that uses a multilingual TTS model with language‑ID conditioning and incorporates grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion, reference‑speech filtering, and candidate‑text selection. It proposes phoneme‑frequency‑guided selection (PFGS) to rank sentences based on phoneme frequencies from real ASR labels, and demonstrates that random augmentation and PFGS both improve ASR performance across Arabic, French, Italian, and Portuguese test sets, with PFGS yielding up to a 19.3% relative WER reduction. The study also shows that filtering reference speech can further lower WER by up to 0.59 points on certain datasets.
By Zhen Wang, TianRui Wu, RongQi Han, Hao Wu, Wei Liang
arXiv:2609.15758v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Extending large-scale multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to low-resource languages remains challenging. Model performance is skewed...
By Thai Thi Thanh Thao Dang, Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill
arXiv:2606. 19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training.
By Yue Heng Yeo, Haoyang Li, Yizhou Peng, Shreyas Gopal, Hexin Liu, Leibny Paola Garcia-Perera, Hardik B. Sailor, Jeremy H. M. Wong, Eng Siong Chng
arXiv:2509.10452v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Pretrained automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper perform well but still need domain adaptation to handle unseen parlance....
By Akshat Pandey, Karun Kumar, Raphael Tang
We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. Large end-to-end Transformer-based ASR models such...
arXiv:2601. 18904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI for speech and audio is increasingly expected to serve users across languages, cultures, and communities, yet current auditory Large Language Models (LLMs) are still largely trained and evaluated on high-resource data.
By Haolong Zheng, Siyin Wang, Zengrui Jin, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
arXiv:2609.23825v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present a comprehensive benchmark of Federated Learning (FL) for multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), evaluating four Speech-LLM archite...
By Jordi Luque, Aleix Sant, Fernando L\'opez
The paper introduces WaxalNet, a benchmark and adaptation study for spontaneous speech recognition across 19 African languages using the WAXAL corpus. It evaluates zero‑shot and fine‑tuned performance of several multilingual foundation models (Whisper, MMS, Omnilingual ASR, SeamlessM4T‑v2), showing that fine‑tuning can substantially reduce word error rates and that LLM decoders generally outperform CTC decoders when the encoder is shared. The authors also demonstrate that a single multilingual model can serve all languages with only a modest WER penalty and provide a native‑speaker audit of failure modes.
By Victor Tolulope Olufemi, Oreoluwa Babatunde, Ramsey Njema, Bolarinwa Gbotemi, Wanchi Lucia Yen, John Uzodinma, Sunday Ajayi, Oluwademilade Williams, Kausar Moshood, Innocent Elendu Anyaele, Akebert Arefaine, Candace Hunzwi, Wongel Dawit Daniel, Emmilly Namuganga, Cleophas Kadima, Athanase Bahizire, Onitsiky Ranaivoson, Emmanuel Aaron, Nicholaus Ladislaus, Idris Muhammed, Jonathan Enoch Simenya, Martin Koome, Matewos Tegete Endaylalu, Peter Ifeoluwa Adeyemo, Hondi Prisca Birindwa, Ukachi Agnes Eze-Mbey, Yacoba Oduro-Yeboah, Pericles Adjovi, Mikel K. Ngueajio, Toluwani Aremu, Prasenjit Mitra
The paper introduces ABX-Accent, a benchmark built on the AESRC dataset that evaluates how well representation learning models adapt to 10 different English accents with less than 10 hours of unlabeled data per accent. It adapts the Zero Resources Challenge ABX metrics for each accent and demonstrates a baseline using adaptive domain normalization to fine‑tune a Contrastive Predictive Coding model, achieving a 23.6% relative improvement on across‑speaker ABX scores compared to non‑adapted models. The dataset and evaluation metrics will be released publicly after the paper is accepted.
By Robin San Roman, Manel Khentout, Tu Anh Nguyen, Paul Michel, Yossi Adi, Emmanuel Dupoux
arXiv:2609.14231v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Controllable synthesis of nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs) is es- sential for natural and expressive speech, but remains challeng- ing due to their aco...
By Ziyu Zhang, Yun Chen, Taihui Wang, Hanzhao Li, Qicong Xie, Rilin Chen, Zhixian Zhao, Lei Xie