The paper introduces a token‑level extension of Omni‑Temporal Classification (OTC) for automatic speech recognition, allowing unsupported tokens to be bypassed while preserving supervision for the rest of the word. Across 19 languages and three corpora, this token‑level OTC consistently outperforms standard CTC, achieving the lowest mean word error rate on every dataset and a 9.45% average relative WER reduction. A predictive‑entropy‑indexed schedule replaces epoch‑based relaxation, reducing training‑length dependence while maintaining performance.
arXiv:2609.09719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-aligned speech tokenization methods have emerged to better align speech tokens with LLM token spaces, enabling more effective utilization of pretr...
arXiv:2608. 01281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phoneme-based multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) can share acoustic evidence across languages more directly than language-specific subword modeling.
The paper introduces a method that allows automatic speech recognition systems to learn new words during test time using unlabeled data. It combines a frozen CTC acoustic model for spellings, a frozen language model for detecting out‑of‑vocabulary words, and an adaptation module that expands the vocabulary by learning lexical token representations from CTC-generated candidates. Experiments on LibriSpeech and dysarthric speech data show relative character‑error‑rate reductions of up to 14.97% and 6.67% for recurring OOV words, respectively.
arXiv:2607. 06831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-text alignment means finding the temporal boundaries of each word in the audio.
arXiv:2606. 27698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition systems are notoriously both sensitive to adversarial and benign perturbations.
The paper introduces a training‑free speech‑and‑text‑to‑pronunciation (ST2P) pipeline that combines lexical candidates from G2P tools with acoustic rescoring using frozen pretrained S2P models. By performing a left‑to‑right greedy search over whole‑sequence negative log‑likelihoods, the method achieves a dramatic reduction in character error rate on Japanese corpora, outperforming both baseline G2P/S2P approaches and commercial multimodal LLMs. The approach is also significantly faster—3–3.5× faster than beam search and twice as fast as direct decoding—while maintaining high accuracy across multiple languages.
arXiv:2606. 20518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching text-to-speech systems achieve remarkable zero-shot quality but remain static after deployment: pronunciation errors on out-of-vocabulary proper nouns persist unless the model is retrained.
arXiv:2608.28916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly evaluated with word error rate (WER), yet many voice workflows depend on exact written values f...
The paper introduces Hybrid Search, a method that refines warm-initialized large language model (LLM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by exploiting interactions between ASR hidden states and the base LLM’s hidden states. By identifying tokens with high semantic dependence and selectively correcting them, the approach surpasses traditional global LLM‑correction techniques such as rescoring and late fusion. The study demonstrates that even after warm initialization, LLM‑based ASR models can further benefit from their base LLM during inference.
PTC-Bias is a two-stage framework that improves contextual biasing in speech large language models by using phoneme-level temporal competition. In the first stage, PTC Retrieval performs frame-synchronous phoneme decoding to generate a compact shortlist of bias words and their speech intervals. The second stage, PTC Correction, applies a local competition between retrieved candidates and mismatched transcript spans within those intervals, reducing near-homophone and word-segmentation errors without extra SpeechLLM passes. Experiments on LibriSpeech demonstrate consistent gains across two SpeechLLMs, with PTC-Bias reducing B-WER by up to 23.9% relative to CTC-Filter while keeping U-WER nearly unchanged.
The paper proposes a linguistically structured multi‑task learning framework for recognizing non‑canonical phonemes by decomposing phoneme prediction into articulatory feature dimensions such as manner, place, and voicing. A hierarchical architecture with task‑specific heads and a cross‑attention fusion module is combined with semi‑supervised Momentum Pseudo‑Labeling and a cascaded training strategy that gradually introduces articulatory tasks. Experiments on the L2‑ARCTIC dataset demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models and produce interpretable error patterns aligned with phonological feature structure.
The study investigates how textual neural models degrade when inputs contain noise such as typos, OCR errors, or dropped words. It finds that model performance decline is largely consistent across architectures under word‑level noise but diverges under character‑level noise, a difference attributed to tokenization rather than architecture. By applying a short contrastive training recipe, diverse encoders converge to a common robustness curve, enabling prediction of a model’s noise resilience and the ability to enhance robustness at specific noise scales through targeted training.