arXiv Computation and Language

Sequential Adapter Stacking for Cross-Lingual Low-Resource ASR

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Language Family Matters: Evaluating LLM-Based ASR Across Linguistic Boundaries

The paper introduces a new strategy for connecting large language models (LLMs) to speech encoders in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by sharing a single connector across languages within the same linguistic family. This approach reduces the number of parameters needed compared to training a separate connector for each language, while improving generalization across different domains and real‑world corpora. Experiments with two multilingual LLMs and two speech datasets demonstrate that family‑based connectors are both efficient and effective for multilingual ASR deployment.

By Yuchen Zhang, Ravi Shekhar, Haralambos Mouratidis
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2607. 04814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale.

By Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Christiane Fellbaum, Happy Buzaaba
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Adaptive Fisher-Whitened Cross-Covariance for Low-Resource Speech Recognition

The paper introduces task-informed parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for low-resource speech recognition by applying Fisher-Whitened Cross-Covariance Analysis (FCCA) to Whisper and Qwen3-ASR. Two extensions—Asymmetric-Coupled FCCA (AC‑FCCA) and Adaptive‑Rank FCCA (AR‑FCCA)—are proposed to exploit cross‑layer sharing and adapt rank allocation within a fixed parameter budget. Experiments on multilingual datasets show that standard FCCA matches or surpasses LoRA, while AR‑FCCA consistently improves performance across models without increasing trainable parameters.

By Asmee Mishra, Mengjie Qian, Brechtje Post, Kate Knill
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

SyRA-CS: Synthetic-to-Real Adaptation for Code-Switched ASR with Meta-Learning

SyRA-CS is a synthetic-to-real adaptation framework for code‑switched ASR that uses Reptile meta‑learning to create pair‑specific initializations from synthetic CS speech. For each language pair and pretrained model, the system meta‑trains on a synthetic CS‑FLEURS subset and then adapts with just one hour of labeled real target speech. Across four architectural settings and four language pairs, SyRA-CS consistently outperforms continual fine‑tuning, achieving up to 17.7% relative WER reduction for XLS‑R and 5.3–5.8% for other models.

By Fadel Thior, Ahmer Tabassum, Haania Siddiqui, Hanan Aldarmaki, Thamar Solorio